dree・❥・ > dree・❥・'s Quotes

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

“I was no longer myself. I knew the great evil of the world was not that we are too hard, but that we are too soft”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent. Cooperative.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“Because beneath my apprehension is the stronger, deeply ingrained need to be liked. To be accepted. To be forgiven. To be recognized as good. I'll do anything to redeem myself.”
― Ann Liang, I Hope This Doesn't Find You

“I really can't stand it when people are angry at me. Like, I know it might be simple for others, but I can't focus on anything else. I can't just forget about it and go on with my own life. It's like there's something hard wedged inside my own chest. I'll always feel guilty. I'll always want to make amends.”
― Ann Liang, I Hope This Doesn't Find You

“You have to prove yourself over and over, and when the glory for your most recent achievement expires, as it must, as it always will, you have to start again, but with more eyes trained on you, more people waiting for the day your talent withers, and your discipline weakens, and your charm wears away. Success is only meant to be rented out, borrowed in small doses at a time, never to be owned completely, no matter what price you're willing to pay for it.”
― Ann Liang, I Am Not Jessica Chen

“That's the one thing I've worked for my entire life -- to be someone who matters. That's why my parents moved to this country. That's my purpose. If I can't do it, then what's the point of anything? What's the point of me? What possible value could I provide?”
― Ann Liang, I Am Not Jessica Chen

“You can say things over and over to yourself, but the moment you say them out loud to someone else, they become something different, like you’re taking a fear and giving it a solid shape so it can actually hurt you. And when someone else says the things you’re saying in your head—that has the same effect. It should feel better to be sharing it, but it also makes it less deniable.”
― David Levithan, Take Me with You When You Go

“If you’re used to people being shitty, it’s hard to accept niceness. Your instinct is to fuck it up. And run the hell away.”
― David Levithan, Take Me with You When You Go

“And this, I think, is my ultimate fatal flaw. Missing people who don’t miss me back. Clinging on to strands of string that shouldn’t mean half as much as they do. It takes so little for me to love someone, yet so long for me to move on.”
― Ann Liang, This Time It's Real

“I guess my point is that I do believe in love. Really. I'm just not convinced that kind of love could ever happen to me.”
― Ann Liang, This Time It's Real

“I’d rather be the villain who lives to the end than the hero who winds up dead”
― Ann Liang, If You Could See the Sun

“Without her looks, this city would turn on her. It would claim that she didn’t deserve to be as competent as she was. The men,
meanwhile, could be as tan, as fat, and as old as they wished. It would have no bearing on what people thought of them.”
― Chloe Gong, These Violent Delights

“I didn’t know you had such a praise kink.”
― Ann Liang, If You Could See the Sun

“Funny how someone you thought of every waking moment for months, how a type of longing that was so significant it became a building block of your identity, eventually slips wholly from your mind.”
― Austin Taylor, Notes on Infinity