gloria > gloria's Quotes

“A dreamer,” scorns her mother.

“A dreamer,” mourns her father.

“A dreamer,” warns Estele.

Still, it does not seem such a bad word.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Our sheer capacity for feeling got to be so unwieldy that we staggered under it, like Atlas with the weight of the world.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“My mother is Ketterdam. She birthed me in the harbor. And my father is profit. I honor him daily.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Byatt’s carved her initials over and over. BW. BW. BW. She does that everywhere. On the bunk, on her desk in every class we had, on the trees in the grove by the water. Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think if she asked, I’d let her do the same to me.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“My desire to keep him there had, at some point, transcended the alignment of an actor's motivation and his character's. I desperately wanted him to stay, seized by the nonsensical idea that if he left, I would lose him, irretrievably.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Death has a terrible habit of cutting straight through every careful line you've drawn between your present and your future. I had a hundred thousand of these lines, and in one day they were severed, leaving me with nothing but a stack of his medical bills and gambling debt. Death didn't even give me somewhere to direct my anger. All I could do was search the sky.”
― Marie Lu, Warcross

“It’s a dark place, not knowing.
It’s difficult to surrender to.
But I guess it’s where we live most of the time. I guess it’s where we all live, so maybe it doesn’t have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“And whenever I look over at him and he meets my eyes, I try to say, See? It could be like this. It could be like this every day.

But then I see his own words pushed back to me, high and tight in his thoughts: It could. But I'd lose everything I know and everyone I have.”
― Christina Lauren, Autoboyography

“Every locked door has a key. Every problem has a solution.”
― Marie Lu, Warcross

“For the first time in a long time, that little rip in the middle of me, the black bruise on my soul that’s been struggling to heal for nearly a decade, throbs. Old feelings come softly thronging back. Bittersweetness, discord, and confusion.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“The water, too, was still, and I thought, what liars they are, the sky and the water. Still and calm and clear, like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, and really, it never would be again.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“What did she want to tell me that was so tremendous it had drawn tears from her, a woman made of marble?”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
― Thucydides

“There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”
― Richard Dawkins

“In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken."
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. "Because I want you to know," she says, "that there is life after survival.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“but God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“The first step will be unlearning all the things you've taught me for my entire life. It took several thousand miles for me to begin believing that I am better than the worst things I've done.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven