Nina > Nina's Quotes

“...the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.”
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Physical comfort--materialism, if you like--is the enemy of any serious spirituality, I think. When we're warm and well fed, our souls can be empty and we still make it through the day. And as I've discovered recently, it is the greatest poverty of all.”
― Lucinda Riley, The Midnight Rose

“And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.”
― Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.” And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

“Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.”
― Meg Wolitzer

“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven't even got a word for the quality I mean--for the self-sufficiency of man's spirit. It's difficult to call it selfishness or egotism, the words have been perverted, they've come to mean Peter Keating. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once--and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.”
― Ayn Rand

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Love is a bruise. The best way to let it heal is to stop touching it.”
― Julie Wright, Lies Jane Austen Told Me

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Having passion for work alone might be the ultimate goal of all, because the work is the only thing that is really, truly yours. You’re entitled only to your labor. You’re not entitled to the fruit of your labor. The universe guarantees no results.”
― Des Linden, Choosing to Run: A Memoir

“To you who eat a lot of rice because you’re lonely,
To you who sleep a lot because you’re bored,
To you who cry a lot because you are sad, I write this down.

Chew on your feelings that are cornerned like you would chew on rice.
Anyway, life is something that you need to digest.”
― Chun Yang Hee