acdt > acdt's Quotes

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I just want her to be one of us, but when you think about saints, I don't imagine any of them made their families happy.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

"But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“We are all the same, our skin and our feet and our hands. Pain is universal; it does not lower itself for titles or wealth.”
― Sally Christie, The Sisters of Versailles

“What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream! And at others, what a heap of absurdities it is!”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“The cruel truth is that it is harder to survive when you have something to care about.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“They, they, they. The mysterious "they" of Versailles, as though it is the palace itself that talks, as though the statues and mirrors can speak.”
― Sally Christie, The Sisters of Versailles

“Maybe our skin doesn’t scar the same as yours, but our hearts do. Sometimes they never heal.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Serpent and the Wings of Night

“It was one thing to wear a dress out of necessity, another thing for the world to know of it. Our people reserved their ugliest names for men who acted like women; lives were lost over such insults.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Men and their secrets," she said. "We spend a lifetime trying to unravel them, and once they're gone, we're still at their mercy.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King

“Maybe he loved her in a way. But he could never love her for what she really was. Loving everything in her but her humanity wasn't loving her at all.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King

“To give someone that much of yourself. To give someone the power to destroy you.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King

“Nothing matters but this, Oraya. Nothing. Step over temporary barriers. Once you win, the world is yours. That is the time for dreaming. But this? This is the time for conquering.”
― Carissa Broadbent, The Serpent and the Wings of Night

“People are awfully good at forgetting unpleasant things.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Embarrassment, as it turns out, is more powerful than information. And shame is the enemy of truth.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Time, in our experience, is linear, but in truth time is also looped. It is like a piece of yarn, in which each section of the strand twists and winds around every other - a complicated and complex knot, in which one part cannot be viewed out of context from the others. Everything touches everything else. Everything affects everything else. Each loop, each bend, each twist interact with each other. It is all connected, and it is all one.

But every once in a while, there are experiences that slice all the other moments apart - stark, singular things that mark the difference between Before and After. These moments are singular, separate from the knot. Separate even from the thread. They can't be tugged at or loosened. They cannot be wound into something lovely or intricate or delicate. They do not interact seamlessly with the fabric of a life. .They are of another substance entirely. Unstuck in time, and out of sync with a life's patterns and processes.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“When I was a little girl, they told us to keep our eyes on the ground. They told us not to ask about the houses that burned. They told us to forget. And we were good children. We followed the rules.

And now I realize, there is a freedom in forgetting. Or at least it is something that feels like freedom.

There is a freedom in not asking questions.

There is a freedom in being unburdened by unpleasant information.

And sometimes, a person has to hang on to whatever freedoms she can get.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know. It requires an incredible amount of humility to be willing to be wrong nearly all the time. But we have to be willing to be wrong, and proven wrong, in order to increase knowledge overall. It is a thankless, and essential, job. Thank goodness.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“As a scientist, it is a strange thing for me to stand in front of you and declare that science has no answer. But really, science rarely gives us answers. Rather, science gives us the means by which we may ask more questions: it provides context, connection, and background. It compounds our curiosities. We may stick a pin through the thorax of a butterfly in order to stop its wings and allow us to examine it closely, but by doing so, we will never observe those very wings pressing against the skin of the air and fluttering away. We will never know which direction that butterfly might choose to go, or what it would seek to do next. Science can only teach us so much. You”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“It's amazing how science can work sometimes - a pebble can give us insight into the nature of the mountain. Or a single, whizzing particle can intimate larger truths about the stars.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Even imperfect things can be precious, after all. The choice itself is precious. The smallness and the largeness of an individual life does not change the fundamental honor and value of every manifestation of our personhood.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a community of women trying to mind their own business must be in want of a random man’s opinion.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“But the end does happen. Unavoidably. All relationships between living beings end somewhere, somehow. That’s just the way it is. One party dies, or is called away by other biological needs. Emotions are transient by nature. They’re temporary states brought on by neurophysiological changes that aren’t meant to be long-lasting. The nervous system must revert back to homeostasis. All relationships associated with affective events are destined to end.”
― Ali Hazelwood

“How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“...he used to speak of how with very great paintings it's possible to know them deeply, inhabit them almost, even through copies. Even Proust -- there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so -- the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream the image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because -- the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy—smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit—was also the old man who’d clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch