Abby > Abby's Quotes

“I think about this a lot,' she says. 'The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can't have one without the other.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“...she had described love as the act of teaching another person how to wound you most, and then agreeing tacitly never to do so.”
― Lindsay Stern, The Study of Animal Languages

“It occurred to me then that to be a child is to know the cradle rocks both toward the parent and away from them. That is the ebb and flow of life, swinging toward and away from one another, perhaps so we build up the strength for that one moment we will be rocked so far away, the person we love the most is gone by the time we return.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“The only thing that looked at her was the dispassionate sky and it looked at everything with the same gaze.”
― Pip Adam, The New Animals

“It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.”
― Julian Barnes

“The exhaustion the family collapsed into after he'd walked off slamming the door, like a kind of post-coital bliss, only post-violence. A silence so passive it felt like peace.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“Everything her mother did was what she thought was best, as all mothers do - invisible service in the shadows of the things for which they themselves had longed.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“How could the waves do it, through each and every moment, and so naturally, as if it was for the first time, as if it was for the last time, as if it was for the middle time, as if it would go on forever, and as if it would one day end. The sea moved forward and back with all of these possibilities, and all of them were true.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“You put us on a pedestal in order to look up our skirts.”
― Julian Barnes, England, England

“...Poleman kept telling them it was nearly Anzac Day and they needed to remember the sacrifices of the soldiers, and her thinking that the Civil War taught her that people in power don't give a fig about people like her and their sacrifice, they only cared about people who could help them cling to power, that there was no point trusting anyone with a story to tell or someone else's sacrifice to sell, that stories of sacrifice are only used to help those in power, otherwise it's not a sacrifice, it's just a non-grieved over death”
― Brannavan Gnanalingam, Sodden Downstream

“Any notion you like, no matter how mad it seems, can be a fact's chrysalis. Once you say it loud enough and often enough it becomes debatable, Debates change minds. Debate is the larval stage of truth, Constant, unflagging, loud repetition completes your notion's metamorphis into fact. The fact takes wing and flutters from place to place and mind to mind and makes a living, permanent thing of itself.”
― Donal Ryan, From a Low and Quiet Sea

“The best way to travel is to surrender a little bit of your personality, and I was enjoying not being the most difficult one”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Imagination is kinda like ...
a torch.
So we can remember what is true.
- In the cave of any faith.
Definitely.”
― Coco Solid, How to Loiter in a Turf War

“Rather than presuming a "community" and attempting to hold people accountable based on that fiction, we should define our expectations of and commitments to the others in our various circles of affinity, and use them as the basis of our responses to conflict and harm,”
― Dysophia, What About the Rapists? Anarchist Approaches to Crime and Justice

“What the fuck do you know about young women, Maggie thinks. We don't remember what we want to remember. We remember what we can't forget.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“The living and the dead. Makes them sound like segments of the population, respondents to a survey.”
― Agnes Rossi, The Quick: A Novella and Stories

“...so I looked myself in the mirror for something to do, occupied sufficiently by the brandy's effects and the heightened sense of myself I always get alone in somebody else's bathroom. I saw myself in character, the girl from work here at a time like this.”
― Agnes Rossi, The Quick: A Novella and Stories

“In the 1970s, the literary critic Lionel Trilling mused that the authentic self, though best left undefined, was most likely the 'distinction between an inner true self and an outer false self'. The internet has created a strict line between these selves, where we understand our extrinsic self to be one crouching inside our smartphone and our intrinsic self to be hiding at home on the sofa. But it is not enough to have these separate selves; it is inauthentic to present one self online and another at home. And so we attempt to break down these boundaries through endless sharing, turning ourselves inside out for the consumption of others. Sharing has become how we socialise.”
― Pandora Sykes, How Do We Know We're Doing It Right: Other Essays on Modern Life

“I wish my dad had walked out on us.'
'You don't mean that.'
'I do. He was a dad to remember, not to keep; he still is.”
― Laia Jufresa, Umami

“I wonder if knowing the meaning of now will be enough to prepare me to embrace tomorrow.”
― Chris Tse, Super Model Minority