Rina Olsen > Rina's Quotes

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“...in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being part of an enterprise that will outlast you.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Well if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o’clock, you hardly think what you’re going to feed the corpse for dinner."
“Aspargus is in season,” said Francis helpfully.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“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

“All this happened, more or less.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“But,” began the Zainichi North Korean man, “even if we know all that stuff, isn’t it pointless if the people discriminating against you don’t?”

“What matters is that we know,” I said. “Those ignorant haters who discriminate based on nationality and ethnicity are pathetic. We need to educate ourselves and make ourselves stronger and forgive them. Not that I’m anywhere near that yet.”
― Kazuki Kaneshiro, Go