Sterling Secor > Sterling's Quotes

“I am not a boy or a girl. Do you know the shape of water? Do you know clouds, and mountains, or every bud of wisteria at the height of spring? Your eyes follow me but you've never really seen me.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night

“Can I be everything and nothing at the same time? Extra fat, extra parts, narrow bones. A shadow you know is there but whose shape remains unseen until it emerges on concrete. I want a body that’s easy to manipulate.
What a gift that no one sees inside my mind. What a curse that no one sees inside my mind.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night

“Every generation before had a semblance of chance, but we have the end of the world. This end of the world. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, and I wish we could think of a future without a thousand ways of how we must change to endure it.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night

“Monsterhood is a girl's body you don't belong in.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night

“I want to linger here in the in-between, half-made, in some permanent adolescence, forever. I don't ever want to become my full self.”
― Emily Austin, Interesting Facts About Space

“I worry that I am a shell for something bad. That deep down, in the spot where most people keep their souls, I keep a weird little bug. I picture him there, leaning on the apple core of my soul, crunching on what remains of what’s good of me.”
― Emily R. Austin, Interesting Facts about Space

“There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life. That is why she has always preferred books - because to be alive is so much harder.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“I feel more like a person than ever because
I'm starting to hate myself”
― Henry Hoke, Open Throat

“I have so much language in my brain

and nowhere to put it”
― Henry Hoke, Open Throat

“Trauma is like a gift. The shittiest fucking gift in the world. Coal in your motherfucking stocking. But the minute you receive it, it becomes yours. And it’s your responsibility what you do with it. And you can use it as an excuse to destroy your life and destroy the lives of people around you, but you shouldn’t.”
― Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Yes, Daddy

“Look, if you don't make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren't to be trusted.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“Sometimes it's hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“Rich people, thought Judy—she thought this then, and she thinks it now—generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“Being humorless, she thought, was even worse than being dumb.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“The women I dated were often my age, that was fine. But the men always had to be older than me because if they were my same age then it became too obvious how much more powerful I was and this was a turnoff for both of us. Men needed a head start for it to be even.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“But while you’re here, officer, why don’t you hold this railroad spike for me? Hold it in your hand and tell me how heavy it is. Tell me which one of us you’d use it on.
See what happens if you try.”
― Andrew Joseph White, Compound Fracture

“There's a whole spectrum of reactions to coming out. Getting kicked out is one extreme–being accepted wholeheartedly is the other. But in the middle, there's this. The awkwardness, the refusals to acknowledge, the uncomfortable weirdness of turning away.”
― Andrew Joseph White, Compound Fracture

“Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it's uniquely awful.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“I made mistakes like this all the time, seeking affirmation from the very worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“My memory begins with my anger.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“After you died I couldn't hold a funeral,
So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine.
These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine.
These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“If we could identify our last times as easily as our first times, thousands of moments would be lived more intensely.”
― Maud Ventura, My Husband

“War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War