Elle > Elle's Quotes

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
― Audre Lorde

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“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

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”
“To live,” said Camilla.
“To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“We'll always be in each other's lives and we'll always have this feeling between us, and it's better.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

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

“I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”
― Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Oh Susie, I often think that I will try to tell you how very dear you are, and how I'm watching for you, but the words won't come, though the tears will, and I sit down disappointed. Yet, darling, you know it all-- then why do I seek to tell you? I do not know. In thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane, and chain myself up there so I won't injure you.”
― Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

“One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You