Michelle > Michelle's Quotes

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.”
― Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“How can people die when you’re in a fight with them? When you’re smack in the middle of hating them? When absolutely nothing between you has been worked out?”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“As Sondheim said, Nice is different than good. Do you need to do whatever you’re told to be a nice person? Maybe. Do you need to do whatever you’re told to be a good person? Of course not! Man, woman, personal, professional—some people have a skill for persuading you the best thing you can be is obedient. A”
― Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“Captain?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you think it was destiny that brought us together?"
He squinted and, after a thoughtful moment, shook his head. "No. I'm pretty sure it was Cinder.”
― Marissa Meyer, Cress

“A grab bag of contemporary blues song titles includes “Lick It Before You Stick It,” “You Ain’t Cheatin’ by the Rules,” “I’ll Drink Your Bathwater, Baby,” “Everything I Like to Eat Starts with a ‘P,’” “If I Can’t Cut the Mustard (I Can Still Lick around the Jar),” “Your Dog’s about to Kill My Cat,” and “It Ain’t Cheatin’ until You Get Caught.”
― Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll

“She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. 'These silly dreams you have when you're young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they'd be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would have hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything -because that's what growing older is.”
― Dennis Lehane, Mystic River

“What kind of life can you have in a house without books?”
― Sherman Alexie, Flight

“They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.”
― Sherman Alexie, Flight

“I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.”
― Sherman Alexie, Flight

“Tell me. What is the point of life, if truth is not worth standing up for? If justice is a hollow shell? If beauty and grace are burnt to ashes, and evil rejoices in the flames? Shall I weep on that day, and lose my mind, or join the rejoicing and lose my soul? Shall I sit in my room? Should I go for a long walk, but where might I go so as not to smell the smoke? Should I just go on, Mrs. Nettles, like everyone else?”
― Robert McCammon, Speaks the Nightbird

“They passed a bank thermometer that read twenty degrees, but from the cold air blowing into the car, Halloran thought that was pretty optimistic. He’d heard once that all the thermometers in Minnesota were calibrated ten degrees high, just to keep the population from moving en masse.”
― P.J. Tracy, Monkeewrench

“And in the bug, which moved upward more surely on the gentler grade, he kept looking out between them as the road unwound, affording occasional glimpses of the Overlook Hotel, its massive bank of westward-looking windows reflecting back the sun. It was the place he had seen in the midst of the blizzard, the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors carpeted with jungle.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Hopefully, anyone who saw a woman riding a screaming mermaid in a wheelchair down Leavenworth at a quarter to five in the morning would just think they'd had too much to drink.”
― Seanan McGuire, One Salt Sea

“It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grown up in the absence, in other people’s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in search of food: Once I get mine, you’re on your own.”
― Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We don’t necessarily know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that violence is as simple as it is complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt in so many terrible, intimate ways.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Chickens, no doubt, have pluck.”
― Lucie B. Amundsen, Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-changing Egg Farm - from Scratch

“She’d been a resourceful thief, a narcissistic Robin Hood who stole a rich education from white people and kept it.”
― Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians: Stories

“Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I learned a long time ago that life introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it’s been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ “baseball” and “father” in three consecutive sentences.”
― Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians: Stories

“There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

“Other eras and cultures often asked different questions from the ones we ask now: What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life? What’s your contribution to the world or your community? Do you live according to your principles? What will your legacy be? What does your life mean? Maybe our obsession with happiness is a way not to ask those other questions, a way to ignore how spacious our lives can be, how effective our work can be, and how far-reaching our love can be.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

“Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity. And the history of silence is central to women’s history.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions