Mischa > Mischa's Quotes

“Zwischen Immer und Nie. Zwischen Immer und Nie. Between always and never.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“De quoi ai-je peur? De toi, enfin de moi sans toi.”
― Mathias Malzieu, La Mécanique du cœur

“But seriously, I believe I'm a sort of Ideal Woman, if you know what I mean. I'm the sort of woman who can take men away from their wives, but I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn't really, after all.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

“You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

“People may be fascinated by your wounded heart, but that won't make them love you for who you are.”
― Mathias Malzieu, La Mécanique du cœur

“I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“But then I realized, they weren't calling out for their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers, purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in in for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying lonliness is the human condition, get used to it.

The wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough for us to hid in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.”
― Janet Fitch

“We love each other like matches in the dark. We don't talk, we catch fire instead ”
― Mathias Malzieu, La Mécanique du cœur

“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“She's made for wrapping around you.”
― Mathias Malzieu, La Mécanique du cœur

“Prima o poi nella vita passa tutto, credimi. Si guarisce sempre, anche se ci vuole del tempo.”
― Mathias Malzieu, La Mécanique du cœur

“He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn't changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight