Grace > Grace's Quotes

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It's the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“for a moment now I reflected on the fact that, although Meredith Wittman and I both wanted to be writers, she was going about it by interning at a magazine, whereas I was sitting at this table in a Hungarian village trying to formulate the phrase “musically talented” in Russian, so I could say something encouraging by proxy to an off-putting child whose father had just punched him in the stomach. I couldn’t help thinking that Meredith Wittman’s approach seemed more direct.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
― Margaret Sanger

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
― Margaret Sanger

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“But maybe the road split between:

a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads