Lorena > Lorena's Quotes

“Perhaps the wisdom of birds resides, not in the individual, but in the flock, the congregation.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Why did you think he described the other world—the one he said he went to most often—as a labyrinth?’

Ketterley shrugged. ‘A vision of cosmic grandeur, I suppose. A symbol of the mingled glory and horror of existence. No one gets out alive.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I am not home. I am here.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Never’ has come to stay. ‘Never’ feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer here.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Destroying what someone else cherished never brought back what you yourself had lost. All it did was spread grief like a contagion.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“The greater the desire, the greater the suffering, and now she desired greatness itself.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“If you want a fate other than what Heaven gave you, you have to want that other fate. You have to struggle for it. Suffer for it.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“Learn to want something for yourself, Ma Xiuying. Not what someone says you should want. Not what you think you should want. Don’t go through life thinking only of duty. When all we have are these brief spans between our nonexistences, why not make the most of the life you’re living now? The price is worth it.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“How could her body be a woman’s body, if it didn’t house a woman?”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“A woman gambles all of herself, body and future, when she marries. That's more courageous than any risk a bureaucrat takes when it concerns only his face, or his wealth”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“The residence’s doors banged and slammed as if by angry ghosts, and Ouyang felt his ancestors’ eyes upon him as he ate with the son of his family’s murderer, the person he held dearest in all the world.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“The memory of Esen's fingertips on his face seared him. Part of him yearned for the debasement of that touch again, and an equal part hated Esen for having called pleasure and submissiveness out of him without even realizing what he had done. Eash part hurt. The combined pain of them crushed him.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“Nobody will ever end me. I’ll be so great that no one will be able to touch me, or come near me, for fear of becoming nothing”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“Yes.' Ouyang tried to laugh. It stuck in his throat like a salty sea urchin. 'This is your death. That is mine. We're fixed, Esen.' The saltiness was choking him. 'We have always been.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“In that moment, Esen seemed breathtakingly handsome, so much so that Ouyang felt a sharp ache of incomprehension, that someone this perfect, so alive and so full of the pleasure of the moment, could be. It hurt like grief.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“Lady Rui's jaw was tight with the same intensity Zhu had glimpsed earlier: a compressed rage that had as its heart the female desire to survive all that sought to make her nothing.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“Look at me and see the person who will win. The person who will rule.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“And the boy who had been the Zhu family’s second daughter said, clearly enough for Heaven to hear, “My name is Zhu Chongba.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“In that respect, killing Chaghan hadn't been a sin. But breaking Esen felt like one.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Who taught you all this, doctor?"

The reply came promptly:
"Suffering.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?"
"I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps."
"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?"
"Comprehension.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Do you believe in God, doctor?"

No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague