Abby Strzelecki > Abby's Quotes

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“At lunchtime I bought a huge orange
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all my jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.”
― Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“You'd probably say it was a small world, but not if you have to clean it.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“Am I human or humanoid? Have I been dreamt into being?”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

“I am a pomegranate ripe with moist seeds, each seed a killing I'm going to carry out at some future time. When I've no more seeds inside me, when there's nothing left but flesh, I want to meet the man who made me.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees

“I say something

it sounds like words

it's not what they want to hear”
― Henry Hoke, Open Throat

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

“If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“I wanted to cry, but I realized that I was too old for that. I would be a woman soon and I would have to learn how to live with a divided heart.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“I think what I want is for someone to know me. Really know me. Know me better than anyone else and maybe even me. Isn’t that why we commit to another? It’s not for sex. If it were for sex, we wouldn’t marry one person. We’d just keep finding new partners. We commit for many reasons, I know, but the more I think about it, the more I think long-term relationships are for getting to know someone. I want someone to know me, really know me, almost like that person could get into my head. What would that feel like? To have access, to know what it’s like in someone else’s head. To rely on someone else, have him rely on you. That’s not a biological connection like the one between parents and children. This kind of relationship would be chosen. It would be something cooler, harder to achieve than one built on biology and shared genetics. I think that’s it. Maybe that’s how we know when a relationship is real. When someone else previously unconnected to us knows us in a way we never thought or believed possible.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“She tilts her head. Her black eye is a pool of ink. It is a bottomless pit. It is a collapsed star, all density and hunger and relentless gravity, pulling everything it can into its center- to be unraveled, unmade, undone, and unrecognizable. How can anyone survive that kind of love?”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Crane Husband

“It´s a sad fact about true love," my mother told me once. "The sheep love me without ceasing, and that is why I am able to cause them pain-love is the path of least resistance, you see? It´s a lot more work to cause harm to someone who mistrusts you, or fears you. Or hates you. Love opens the city gates wide, and allows all manner of horrors right inside. This is why they don´t flinch when I come at them with something unpleasant.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Crane Husband

“You’ll learn that you’re safest around the people you mistrust and dislike. Your guard is up, you see? The more you love someone, the more dangerous to you they become. The more you love someone, the more willing you are to show them your throat.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Crane Husband

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

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

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“They sought me out, here I am. I don’t know how to let go of the dead.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Our Share of Night

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

“It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“There’s a popular saying among doctors: There’s no such thing as alternative medicine; if it works, it’s just called medicine.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life