Rhawnie Kupfer > Rhawnie's Quotes

“Hiraeth: homesickness for something that never was and never could be.”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“You know what I realized? No one else lives in my memories but me.”
― Liza M. Wiemer, Hello?

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Does anyone ever? Just take the leap and hope for the best. The bets we dare to make when the odds are against us are what define us. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But that’s life. We can’t always protect ourselves. And as long as you do your honest best with what you have, everything else is just noise.”
― Christian Galacar, Cicada Spring

“I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people—people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin—that they’d be bored as hell by me. It’s a lonely way to go through life.”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“That was what true survival was, keeping the heart beating while continuing to feel everything.”
― Ann Wertz Garvin, I Thought You Said This Would Work

“But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve—if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Mama used to say what you dislike in other people is really what you dislike in yourself.”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“A black, hissing voice in her head: How many mistakes can you live with?”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“All good things end, always. The trick is to enjoy them while they last.”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“There would be bad days, there always would. But she’d collect these good days, each one illuminated, and string them together until they glowed brightly in her memory like Christmas lights in a mirrored room.”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“Could he, by some miracle, keep this going? Could they hide here until the war ends? Until the armies finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to do is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunshine? He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten, France and Germany would not mean what they meant now; they could leave the house and walk to a tourists’ restaurant and order a simple meal together and eat it in silence, the comfortable kind of silence lovers are supposed to share.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“But a person’s anger is often no more than anguish dressed up in a crusty old overcoat.”
― Veronica Henry, Bacchanal

“From when we were young, from a time before we were burdened with jobs and responsibilities and the weight of the world. Because you do grow up and you see the ugliness of things. You read about the atrocities of today and yesterday, and you either internalize and encapsulate your past experiences, become an unrelenting, rigid, product of them, or you realize it’s all just a fucked-up happenstance gone astray, and it always has been. That human existence is less than a dust mote in the cosmic scale of the universe, but then we developed thought, emotion, introspection, and so we stress, we suffer, truly suffer, as only a human can.”
― Benjamin Corman, Summer of '99: Cinema 16 -- Blood, Sweat and Popcorn Oil: A story of growing up, falling in love, and movies in the 90s

“Everyone wants to be great. Rich and famous, smart, clever. Fuck it. Be decent. Be kind.”
― Benjamin Corman, Summer of '99: Cinema 16 -- Blood, Sweat and Popcorn Oil: A story of growing up, falling in love, and movies in the 90s

“You can’t go waking up the past and expect it to lie down again when it comes after you.”
― James Brogden, Hekla's Children

“but they’re never auspicious, are they, the places where your life is detonated?”
― John Fram, The Bright Lands

“Kimbra had been around football long enough to understand that its players weren’t just boys throwing a ball: they were everything the men of this town used to be, or never were, the walking realization of every frustrated hope and squandered opportunity and dream.”
― John Fram, The Bright Lands

“Only an empty cascade of bleachers charged with all the promise of youth and time and the thin, irresistible potential for glory.”
― John Fram, The Bright Lands

“The mind is like warm wax, the world like a brass seal pressed into it. Such imprints are forever stamped into us. I am eternally marred.”
― Danielle Trussoni, The Ancestor

“How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“Here’s what I know. Chasing James won’t do a thing. It won’t help you at all. Because what you need to do is find your initial mistake, the thing that got you stuck in the first place. That first error you made that made you the way you are now. And maybe if you find it, you can undo the damage.”
― Ivy Pochoda, Wonder Valley

“You can’t change yourself by grafting your life onto someone else’s. I know,” she says. “I tried.”
― Ivy Pochoda, Wonder Valley

“The way she offered her hand. The way he accepted it and followed her, without a word. And of course they would feel this quiet closeness; they grew up in the same small town. Have overlapping friend and family circles. Went to the same schools. They know each other in a way none of us could ever know them.”
― Katie Lattari, Dark Things I Adore

“Pieces of myself from a time I have long put in the rearview mirror are resurfacing through the muck, resurrecting against my will.”
― Katie Lattari, Dark Things I Adore

“A sad thing, really. She—she tried really hard not to be sad. But it was in her. It was in her. Part of what made her.”
― Katie Lattari, Dark Things I Adore