Julia Smeaton > Julia's Quotes

“I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“The truth is: I did want to be my dad's poem. I wanted to be his drawing, his novella, his most refined work of art. I wanted him to shape me with his love and intelligence. I wanted him to edit out my mistakes and many indulgences, with a sharp red pencil or a clean eraser.”
― Alysia Abbott, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

“Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny. Period pains, sore boobs, child birth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don't. They have to seek it out. “Women are born with pain built in,” she says. “It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby.
We have it all going on in here inside.”
― Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag: The Scriptures

“I think you know how to love better than any of us. That's why you find it all so painful.”
― Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag: The Scriptures

“-I don't know what to do with it -
-With what?
-With all the love I have for her. I don't know...where to - put it now.”
― Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag: The Scriptures

“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“I want to do something splendid...something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.”
― Louisa May Alcott, The Abbot's Ghost: A Christmas Story

“You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end. (Jo March)”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Miss Barry was a kindred spirit after all," Anne confided to Marilla, "You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she is. . . Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“I've had a splendid time," she concluded happily, "and I feel that it marks an epoch in my life. But the best of it all was the coming home.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“I love bright red drinks, don’t you? They taste twice as good as any other color.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Youth is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

“I take it as a sign that it is all right to be alive as I am, just as I am, and to keep trying.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I think I've come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am.”
― Jenny Slate

“The women were new friends but I loved them in a massive way. The love was like a large trove of devotion that could only be amassed over time, but it had arrived all at once. The way I loved them felt like it was from long ago.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“My vulnerability is natural and permissible and beautiful to me, and it should remind you of your responsibility to behave like a friend to me and the world.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“This is what makes my mother my mother. She loves the flower and she wants me to know this flower, but she will only smell it once, and then give it to me for unlimited sniffing pleasure and she will be happy about it all.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don’t like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Look at you! You have done what the earliest geniuses have done: You have taken the most basic thing and elevated it. If you are sweet inside of yourself for the most part, this is the truth you will know.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“There has been a misunderstanding about wildness. Bring it in, bring it in, bring wildness in and care for it.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.”
― Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

“And I remember thinking, how cruel it was that our plans were out there somewhere. Another version of our future, out there somewhere, in perpetual orbit.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man

“And sometimes, when the day loomed grey, I'd sit at my desk and remember the heat of that summer. I’d remember the smells of tuberose that were carried by the wind, and the smell of octopus cooking on stinking griddles. I’d remember the sound of our laughter and the sound of a doughnut seller, and I’d remember the red canvas shoes I lost in the sea, and the taste of pastis and the taste of his skin, and a sky so blue it would defy anything else to be blue again. And I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man

“I said to him that just because you can’t remember, doesn’t mean the past isn’t out there. All those precious moments are still there somewhere.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man