Monte > Monte's Quotes

“I don't know what's wrong with me, says Marianne. I don't know why I can't be like normal people.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for a moment that was already in the process of happening.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.”
― Alberto Moravia, Contempt

“I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Since when have you loved me? I said. Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I'd say I loved you before then.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“My memory begins with my anger.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“But I had only known the absurd, and I think that made me profoundly different from them”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage. How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“You are the only one of us who belongs to this country.

No, this country belongs to me. I will be its sole owner and everything here will be mine.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“next time you fall in love, don’t be such a coward?”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“- My mystery is simple: I don't know how to be alive. - Because you only know, or only knew, how to be alive through pain.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“I’m an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes through a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“we can waste some time without wasting our whole lives.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“She'd lost control of her body as a child and never recovered it.”
― Jon Lindsey, Body High

“He mouthed the words "I love you" or "I owe you," as they cuffed me.”
― Jon Lindsey, Body High

“To truly heal, I need to cut off my family.”
― Jon Lindsey

“Home is just a foundational state of being,” I say. “You’ll spend your entire life trying, and failing, to return to it.”
Brooklyn breathes fast, loud gasps. Jolene hugs her.
“But in a way, home can be anything,” I say. “Even Jolene can be home.”
For me, she is.”
― Jon Lindsey, Body High

“I realized how avoidance was the most attention you could give something”
― Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl

“Did she still miss me sometimes like I missed her—missing that had no electricity, no lightning, or thunder, a missing like a hand digging into an empty chip bag searching for crumbs, any last salty bit, a missing more like mourning.”
― Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl

“I've been to so many places and not a single one has saved me.”
― Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl

“My head’s a mess. Everywhere I go, I seem to find a way to trap myself. Most days, I can ignore it, but like anything you leave open and forgotten, it begins to rot. There are just too many thoughts, memories. I can’t look at anything and not think of something else.”
― Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl

“He had his problems,” she said, “there’s no denying that. But none of that is your fault and nothing is decided. It’s up to you to be more than him.”
― Jean Kyoung Frazier, Pizza Girl

“You want things so badly, but I think one of the things you want is to never have to fight for the other things you want, and that makes it impossible to, y'know, have those other things! It's not even a vicious circle, man. It's a stupid circle.”
― Nat Cassidy, Rest Stop

“What continues to surprise me, and what I still don't understand, is not the reason that love ends but the way that it endures.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Looking back, it seems that was how Jude always was with me: keeping his distance, never asking for anything I might not want to give. That steadiness that I took to be a strength--his consistency--I realize now was a kind of boundary, a way of drawing a line in the sand. Like a sprinkling of salt at the threshold, it was a kind of spell to keep himself safe, unchanged. What he needed more than anything was to believe he needed nothing, that if I should ever leave, he'd remain the same man. But I had his key in my coat pocket and I was happy then, because it seemed like he was letting me in.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It's not so easy, I'd tried on one occasion to explain, to tell what keeps people together, what makes them fall apart. You can leave someone and still love them. You can lie with someone and never love them at all.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Love, I still believe, exists outside of time. Or it is its own time. It makes its own measures--not in minutes or hours or calendar days but in something closer to seasons, or tidal movements.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt