Norah Ahmed > Norah's Quotes

“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“You're beautiful, but you're empty. No one could die for you.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“some things needed to stay in the past because the past was the only place they made sense.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”
― anthony burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn’t know you wanted.” A sharp, pitying smile pinched the corners of her lips. “What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life?”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere