Elina > Elina's Quotes

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I have become lost to the world
In which I otherwise wasted so much time
It means nothing to me
Whether the world believes me dead
I can hardly say anything to refute it
For truly, I am no longer a part of the world.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But mostly, I missed watching you two together; I missed watching you watch him, and him watch you; I missed how thoughtful you were with each other, missed how thoughtlessly, sincerely affectionate you were with him; missed watching you listen to each other, the way you both did so intently.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“[She] wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he’s acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It was too much to hope for a light at the end of the tunnel. I gave up on that long ago, but if I looked hard enough, there was always light on my next step.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“We fear what we don’t understand, so it’s easier to think of them as monsters. It makes us feel safe rather than having to think about the possibility that some people are just born that way, and it could be any of us or someone we love.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“Being his parent didn’t stop after he died, and it was my job as his mother to protect his memory in the same way I protected him while he was alive.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“If you did everything right and it still turned out wrong, then what was the point?”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“Nobody told me grief became so unpredictable over time. I never knew when it was going to hit, so there wasn’t any way to prepare for the attacks. The attacks had grown farther apart, but they’d never be gone, and I’d never be prepared. It didn’t help to remind myself I’d survived them before and would survive them again because, in the moment, I was sure it was the one that would kill me.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“I might have lost my faith in God, but I hadn’t lost my fear.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“He was my heart, living and breathing outside my body.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“Time had dragged. Nobody told me time slowed down with tragedy and how each minute became excruciating when it was painful to merely exist.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“I was unbelievably lonely but rarely allowed myself to admit it. There were times when the debilitating aloneness threatened to swallow me like a black hole and today was one of those days, but I’d gotten used to breaking up my days into manageable moments to get through them.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“Usually, when you were in a state of grief, people stepped gingerly around you. They were careful not to break you any more than you’d already been broken. They were gentle and kind, speaking in quiet tones as if you might crumble if they spoke too loudly. Not so with us. There was no kindness. No sympathy. Nobody acknowledged our world had been destroyed. I was completely alone in my grief and loss.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“There had to be a God, because there had to be a heaven. A time when I got to see him again, and he was the one to walk me home.”
― Lucinda Berry, Saving Noah

“Just because the stars fell doesn't mean they weren't worth wishing on.”
― Lancali ., I Fell in Love With Hope

“Because you don't lose someone once. You lose them hearing a song that reminds you
of their smile. Passing an old landmark. Laughing at a joke they would've laughed at. You lose them infinitely.”
― Lancali ., I Fell in Love With Hope