Lily Frohlich > Lily's Quotes

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.”
― Toni Morrison

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Love is never any better than the lover.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I think that at some point along the way, maybe in that moment, I collapsed proximity with love.”
― Pik-Shuen Fung, Ghost Forest

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“My poor body. My precious body. How had I let her be treated this way? My body was me. To hate my own body was to suffer from an autoimmune disease of the mind.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter divorced parent, I accepted that our collaboration was mandatory. I needed her and hated her all the more for it.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“As a young woman I struck myself against everything - other bodies, cities, myself - but I could never make sense of the marks I made on them, or the marks they made on me. A thing of unknown value has no value, and I treated myself as such. I beat against my life as if it could tell me how to stop hurting, until I was black and blue on the inside. The small softnesses I found, however fleeting, were precious. They may have saved my life.
Now, I am so careful. The more I know my own worth, the less I have to fling myself against anything. When I go back, I can see all the marks that girl made so long ago. I reach my hand through the water and touch their familiar shapes.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that anyone realistically expects young women to easily say no to anything, least of all the sexual desires of men. If I struggle to say no to a lunch invitation, a work request, any number of less fraught entreaties, when I have some pressing personal reason, how can a teenager be expected to stop a man’s hand as it reaches under her clothes? Some do, of course, which seems miraculous.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“My desire was a galloping thing, and her touch, unlike that of boys, didn't snuff it out. If my body had been a passive machine from which men made withdrawals, like an ATM whose code they were handed on the day of their first erection, then with her it was a winning slot machine, screaming jangly music and spewing coins.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Two people pulling each other into Salvation is the only theme I find worthwhile. —E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book”
― Sarah Winman, Still Life

“We like beauty, don’t we? Something good on the eye cheers us. Does something to us on a cellular level, makes us feel alive and enriched. Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgment. Captures forever that which is fleeting. A meager stain in the corridors of history, that’s all we are. A little mark of scuff.”
― Sarah Winman, Still Life

“There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”
― patti smith, Just Kids

“We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets