Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“I will not tell you one single solitary fact about my work, my friends, or the woman I was arrested with. But I will tell you this, Rene Bordelon. You're a gullible fool. You're a terrible lover. And I hate Baudelaire.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Clearly, women in active fighting zones unsettled their contemporaries, but they still left a legacy behind. Girls of the ’30s and ’40s joined the SOE to train as spies against the Nazis because they had been inspired by books and stories about women like Louise de Bettignies—and they weren’t inspired by her feminine graces. They were inspired by her courage, her toughness, and her unflinching drive, just as I imagined Charlie being inspired by Eve’s. Such women were fleurs du mal indeed—with steel, with endurance, and with flair, they thrived in evil and inspired others in doing so.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network

“Guess that's where the tears came from, knowing that there's so much in this great big world that you don't have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you'll have one less heartbreak in your life.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t even know it was out of?”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“If this moment was a sentence, I’d be the period.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Being brave isn't the same as being okay," my mum said quietly.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie

“Instead, I was met with what I'd been trying to pretend hadn't always been a room full of white not-quite-liberals whose opinions, like their money, had been inherited.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie

“My eyes must spend at least fifty per cent of any given day rolled to the back of my head.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie

“That’s the thing about people who love to play devil’s advocate!’ I shouted. ‘There’s no emotional involvement in it for you, there’s nothing at stake!”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie

“You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“You're radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The solution is, everywhere and always, the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal... I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“The loneliness of difference, the loneliness of undesirability, the loneliness of not being admitted into the magic circles of connection and acceptance – the social and professional groupings, the embracing arms.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“someone will remember us
I say
even in another time”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho