Nicky > Nicky's Quotes

“Ah, Lucie.” Aiden smiles, his fingers fanning out wide against my back. “I’d know you anywhere.”
― B.K. Borison, First-Time Caller

“He loved that word. Who wouldn't? "Encouraged." Like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants. —”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“It was an illness of the breath, of the place where the body interacts with the atmosphere, a process so sacred that the Hebrew word ruach, the Chinese word chi, the English word spirit, and the Inuit word sila all derive from words meaning breath or breathing. Breath is liferespiration is the most visible and irrefutable sign that we are still here. To inspire is to breathe in; to expire is to breathe all the way out.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Shadows can only be seen in the presence of light,” he told her, the words agonized. “I worry when you leave, there will be no one left to see me.”
― Kaylie Smith, Enchantra

“We didn’t go through the same shit, but trauma was trauma. It affected everyone differently, but it always affected. I cleared my throat. “I used to tell myself that what was done to me didn’t matter because I’d processed it. Dealt with that shit. But telling myself that proved I hadn’t really dealt with it. Because what I experienced will always matter in some way—sometimes, insignificantly and barely noticeable, and other times, it can ruin your entire fucking day. But that’s okay. And I mean that. Because saying someone chooses to live in the past, rehashing bad shit done to them, is bullshit. You can’t choose that. Things inside you? Parts of your mind and body that you don’t control decide that. And it took a hell of a long time for me to learn that what I can control is how I act in response to those memories—to those emotional wounds. How I treat myself. How I treat others because of it. It’s not as simple as saying that. I know. Nothing is simple.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, A Soul of Ash and Blood

“From blood and ash... we have risen!”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, The War of Two Queens

“Make sure she knows that I am the Chosen, the One who is Blessed, and I carry the blood of the King of Gods in me. I am the Liessa to the wolven, the second daughter, the true heir, owed the crowns of Atlantia and Solis. I am the Queen of Flesh and Fire, and the gods’ guards ride with me. Tell the Blood Queen to prepare for war.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, The ​Crown of Gilded Bones

“Because that’s the thing about humans - we leave traces of our souls everywhere, as unique and identifying as fingerprints.”
― Laura Steven, Our Infinite Fates

“Life sings and blazes. Even when we are numb to it, when we hide from it, when it is too loud and painful to experience, when we aren’t equipped to feel it – it is there, waiting, to be cherished and protected, ready to give us at least one more blast of beauty before the night.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“What I mean is that travel tesseracts experience. It explodes it to the fourth dimension. And it becomes dizzying to realize how many nows are happening all at once.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“To be human is to be scared of our own innate ridiculousness, so we do anything to reduce that ridicule. We clothe our bodies, we procreate behind closed doors, we hide every bodily function, we don’t cry in the post office, or sing in the street, and we try to keep our own ideas in line with what we are told we should think. But life is mess and confusion and full of awkward, shameful realities.”
― Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“But survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Eliminating the risk of bovine TB is one of the reasons we began pasteurizing milk; no doubt Dr. Koch would be bummed to learn we don't call it Kochizing milk.”
― John Green

“Racialized medicine no longer maintained that high rates of consumption among white people was a sign of white superiority; instead, racialized medicine maintained that high rates of consumption among Black people was a sign of white superiority.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“It reminded me, that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“That’s where it lives, my love for him. In the space between the things he could do, and what the chooses instead.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Deep End

“I hated them. I wanted to be them. I couldn't take my eyes off them.”
― Layne Fargo, The Favorites

“Mom didn’t get better. But I will.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“Brilliant, reckless woman.”
― Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm

“But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that the life I’ve created for myself and the person I’ve blossomed into are not because of Ruby but in spite of her.”
― Shari Franke, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom

“But as I reflect on the many incongruities of my childhood, I can’t help but feel sadness for the baby girl who cried for her mother. Who wanted a different kind of love than the kind she received. A love that allows for vulnerability, for tears, for the full range of human emotion. A love that allows a child the freedom to feel.”
― Shari Franke, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom

“When she was younger, she thought that the blood of kings and governors must be gold, for they are a different kind, closer to the gods and constellations. But the drops that fall copiously from the governor’s chest are red. No different from her own.”
― Costanza Casati, Babylonia

“I was tired of living in the between—not just the Between itself, but the in-between I'd nestled myself into. Not quite in the past, but not wholly in the present. Unsure of how to move ahead, unwilling to let go.”
― Erin A. Craig, The Thirteenth Child

“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

“The snow may fall, but the sun also rises.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping

“Remember: nothing scares a man more than a woman who knows she does not need him.”
― Drew Afualo, Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve