smileymakaveli > smileymakaveli's Quotes

“They looked at my stomach and between my legs. They never said nothing to me. Only one looked at me. Looked at my face, I mean. I looked right back at him. He dropped his eyes and turned red.
He knowed, I reckon, that maybe I weren't no horse foaling. But them others. They didn't know.

They went on. I seed them talking to them white women: 'How you feel? Gonna have twins?' Just shucking them, of course, but nice talk. Nice friendly talk. I got edgy, and when them pains got harder, I was glad. Glad to have something else to think about. I moaned something awful. The pains wasn't as bad as I let on, but I had to let them people know having a baby was more than a bowel movement. I hurt just like them white women. Just 'cause I wasn't hooping and hollering before didn't mean I wasn't feeling pain.

What'd they think? That just 'cause I knowed how to have a baby with no fuss that my behind wasn't pulling and aching like theirs? Besides, that doctor don't know what he talking about. He must never seed no mare foal. Who say they don't have no pain? Just 'cause she don't cry? 'Cause she can't say it, they think it ain't there? If they looks in her eyes and see them eyeballs lolling back, see the sorrowful look, they'd know.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for. But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can't tell her. That's the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can't tell her that I'm okay.

The geese don't care that I'm crying again. They're used to it.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“You're not too quiet, by the way.

I find comfort in your silent smiles. Your energy slows me down in this chaotic world....You don't need to say much, I see you speak in other languages. Ones without linguistics.

You're not too quiet, by the way. Your soul is so vibrant it could light up the entire world with a single ray.”
― Chloë Jade, Dear Sensitive Soul

“Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can’t quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated, until you yourself die.
But that is the mirage.
That is grief’s dizzying spell.
The fall isn’t never-ending. It does have a ground floor.
Today, I cry for so long that I finally feel the floor under my feet. I find the bottom. And while I know the hole will be there forever, at least for now, I feel as if I can live inside it. I have learned its boundaries and its edges.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love
silence and darkness.”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“You have ringing in your ears?'

'Not actual ringing. It's like my whole body is a bell, like a huge bell in a tower that's been struck and He held up his hand.

'Let's skip the flowery descriptions. You're anxious. Why? When'd it start?”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Now that Gita is gone, to work as a maid for a wealthy woman in the city, her family has a tiny glass sun that hangs from a wire in the middle of their ceiling, a new set of pots for Gita's mother, a pair of spectacles for her father, a brocaded wedding dress for her older sister, and school fees for her little brother.

Inside Gita's family hut, it is daytime at night. But for me, it feels like nighttime even in the brightest sun without my friend.”
― Patricia McCormick, Sold

“I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“When someone confided in me, a man or a woman who admitted they were having, or had had, "a crazy love affair with a guy" or "a very close relationship with someone," I occasionally felt like opening up. But once the excitement of sharing our secrets was over, I resented having let myself go, if only a little. Those conversations, when I had continually responded to the other person by saying "me too, it's the same for me, I did that too," suddenly seemed futile, removed from the reality of my own passion. Rather, something was lost through these outbursts.”
― Annie Ernaux;, Simple Passion

“From time to time mothers in the wild devour their young,
an appetite born of pure, bright need.
Occasionally,
mothers from ordinary homes, much like our own, feed on the viscid shame their daughters are forced to secrete from glands formed in the favor of men.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“By the middle of the day, I'm struggling to keep my head up, so rather than eating during lunch, I sneak back to Gould, curl up in my bed, and cry.

If it's going to be this hard, I wonder, why even bother? That's a bad attitude to have, especially on the first day, and it makes me wonder what I'm doing at Browick in the first place, why they gave me a scholarship, why they thought I was smart enough to be here. It's a spiral I've traveled before, and every time I arrive at the same conclusion: that there's probably something wrong with me, an inherent weakness that manifests as laziness, a fear of hard work. Besides, hardly anyone else at Browick seems to struggle like I do. They move from class to class knowing every answer, always prepared. They make it look easy.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn't have. I wouldn't have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“After my twenty years of experience on this earth,
I am completely convinced that I was placed on this earth to give others the experience of true,
genuine love, pure acts of kindness rather than receiving it.
As much as I want it....
I'll forever be the giver, not the receiver.”
― Ieisha Brown, The words I have yet to say out loud

“what will become of my stories -
gardens
or
graveyards?”
― Emory Hall, Made of Rivers

“Some people say home is where you come from. But I think it’s a place you need to find, like it’s scattered and you pick pieces of it up along the way.”
― Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken

“I wish I wrote the way I thought
Obsessively
Incessantly
With maddening hunger
I’d write to the point of suffocation
I’d write myself into nervous breakdowns
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing
And I’d write about you
a lot more
than I should”
― Benedict Smith

“Hooyo, patron saint of
my children have different passports to me.
Hooyo, blessed saint of
raising them too far from home.

I don't recognize my own children
they speak and dream in the wrong language
as much as I understand
it may as well be the language of birds.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women.
Sometimes, the men--they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men--they come with hammers.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“We lay our burden at your feet,
careful not to weigh you down,
from you, we are learning
to put ourselves first.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones...but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?”
― Virginia Woolfe, To the Lighthouse

“The sadness will last forever.
It wasn’t a lie. There was sadness, and there was despair, and there was pain—but there was also laughter, and joy, and relief. There was never grief without love or love without grief”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“I missed her every day.

I missed her in ways I didn't yet understand—in ways I wouldn't find out for years to come. I missed her with this deep sort of regret, even though there was nothing I could have done.

She never wanted anyone to see the monster on her shoulder, so she hid it, and when she finally took the monster's hand, it broke our hearts.

It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn't exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she.

And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it. Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.

Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.
And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.

I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.

And I would never wish this pain on anyone.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“At home, silence awaited me, a sound I’d been familiar with for years. How I had come to loathe this hermit‐like existence, this inability to participate in life. Always just dreaming, never truly awake. Look at you, I thought: why do you so often long for solitude in company when you can scarcely bear to be alone anymore?”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“A lifetime is split up into successive stages when people become “old enough to”:
—take Holy Communion...
—start having their period...
—drink wine...
—get a job and go dancing...
—do one's military service
—go and see naughty films
—get married and have kids
—wear black
—stop working
—die

In our lives nothing is thought, everything is done.

People are forever remembering.”
― Annie Ernaux, Shame

“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden," Jacques said. And then: "I wonder why."
...
Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road--and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright--and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
... Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another type of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of the pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room