Aušra > Aušra's Quotes

“Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“She had gotten love, and that was more than plenty of people got on this planet.”
― Dana Schwartz, Immortality: A Love Story

“There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.”
― A. S. Byatt, Possession

“We’re all captives of something, even things we don’t want to admit to.”
― Raven Kennedy, Glint

“Better a villain by truth than a hero by lies. I'll be the devil in your story if that's what you need, but I will not apologize for what I choose to protect.”
― Miranda Lyn, The Unmarked Witch

“I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“From a raging fire that threatened to turn Hazel’s world to ash, the longing instead dampened to a small flame, a flickering candle visible only in the corner of her eyes. You can’t speak to him now, but he’s there if you need him, the candle said. He’s just there, only just out of view. That was the real way she survived losing Jack: by pretending that she hadn’t lost him at all, and that at any moment she might walk up to the big house and see him smiling up at her over tea, see the way his canine teeth extended past the others and overlapped, see his messy hair, which had always contained a hidden pocket of sawdust.”
― Dana Schwartz, Immortality: A Love Story

“I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“It was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“If a story repeated itself so many times over, building itself up brick by brick, did it eventually become the truth? A house with no doors and no windows, offering no escape.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“She was tired, tired of trying so hard for something she didn’t even want.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“You don't have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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

“Being beautiful, was that for men?'
'Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that is what they call being consumed with remorse.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to —really had a very vivid imagination.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men