Bella Adrian > Bella's Quotes

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I spent half my time loving her and the other half hiding how much I loved her.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Please never forget that the sun rises and sets with your smile. At least to me it does. You’re the only thing on this planet worth worshipping.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“...do yourself a favor and learn to grab life by the balls, dear. Don’t be so tied up in trying to do the right thing when the smart thing is so painfully clear.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“People are messy, and love can be ugly. I’m inclined to always err on the side of compassion.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“There is a defiance in being a dreamer”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu. ”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“The day passes like a sentence.
The sun falls like a scythe.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“May I write words more naked than flesh,
stronger than bone, more resilient than
sinew, sensitive than nerve.”
― Sappho

“Love shook my heart
Like the wind on the mountain
rushing over the oak trees.”
― Sappho

“You are, I think, an evening star,
the fairest of all the stars.”
― Sappho

“I have not had one word from her

Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to me, "This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."

I said, "Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love

"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared

"all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck

"myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them

"while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song...”
― Sappho

“Some say an army of horsemen, or infantry,
A fleet of ships is the fairest thing
On the face of the black earth, but I say
It's what one loves.”
― Sappho

“Now the Earth with many flowers puts on her spring embroidery”
― Sappho

“stars around the beautiful moon
hide back their luminous form
whenever all full she shines
on the earth

silvery”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“of all stars the most beautiful”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“A work of art tends to speak of things that are at once too large and too intimate to be summed up, and they speak of them by not speaking at all.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“So under the cover of no one hearing your thoughts, think brave thoughts, searching thoughts, painful thoughts, and maybe foolish thoughts, not to arrive at right answers but to better understand the human mind and heart as you put both to use.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me