Ted > Ted's Quotes

“After a year of therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, "Maybe life isn't for everyone.”
― Larry Brown

“Some people have lives; some people have music.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot. ”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“Relationships are mysterious. We doubt the positive qualities in others, seldom the negative. You will say to your partner: do you really love me? Are you sure you love me? You will ask this a dozen times and drive the person nuts. But you never ask: are you really mad at me? Are you sure you’re angry? When someone is angry, you don’t doubt it for a moment. Yet the reverse should be true. We should doubt the negative in life, and have faith in the positive.”
― Christopher Pike, Remember Me

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but 'love' means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. 'Love' is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one's own in relation to those of the other.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its responsibility ages ago.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow.
It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to “my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Someday you'll find someone who's the total package. Right now you're sowing your oats, and that's not a bad thing. Life is a process of awakening by degrees, in depth and in scope. At its most profound moments, you experience wholeness.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Though I couldn't define what I was, I knew what I wasn't. I was shown the limits, and being confined within a set of walls tormented me and drained me of life, for the real me spanned multitudes, stretching far beyond the bounds of normality encircling ninety percent of the human race.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I wish I could fall in love with a man, but there are too many beautiful women.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“She gave me a puzzle in a box. She put the pieces together patiently, one by one, and completed the picture of me.”
― Miaojin Qiu (邱妙津)

“For a long time, my hidden shame had made me push everyone away. I'd rejected them before they could reject me. I ran away from close relationships even with the people who loved me. I was a blind man fallen into the ocean.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I love my own kind—womankind.”
― Qiu Miaojin

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world...”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Later I saw that change came as change always comes, from a chain of events with a long history, too long to see from back to front, till it come.”
― Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch

“The sea was the giant woman of the planet, fluid and contrary.”
― Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch

“Her sadness had changed her into another woman altogether; it had wearied her and it had also blossomed her.”
― Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch

“I was impatient, troubled by this woman who was so hard to understand. I wanted to keep her safe, or so I told myself, but maybe I fool myself too; maybe 'keep' was the problem. ... Man, you need to give deep feelings of affection and care, not keep them.”
― Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch

“The sea, that expanse of nothingness, could reflect a man back on himself. It had that effect. It was so endless and it moved around underneath the boat. It wasn’t the same thing at all as being on any expanse of earth. The sea shifted. The sea could swallow the boat whole. The sea was the giant woman of the planet, fluid and contrary. All the men shuddered as they gazed at her surface.”
― Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch

“History or love. One must win. I cannot fight history. I cannot. You win. I’m bad. I always will be. But we can do better than letting history win out over love.”
― Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch