Keri Hurst > Keri's Quotes

“There is that terrible memory, surely, but so too are there sweet ones, the tiny memories with the tiny details that are milder in climax, no doubt, but equally powerful...”
― Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

“I never went to his funeral. Few people did. Why would they? But sometimes I can't help but feel that I should have gone. Like it would have made something I cannot name not so lonely. In my own loneliness, I thought a lot about that, about if I should have gone.”
― Morgan Talty

“Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore.”
― Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

“Well, it's simple to love someone," she said. "But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud.”
― Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

“So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really- which meant I guess that he was still living, too.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“I have always believed there is a comfort to be found in despair: namely, from the knowledge that, like a pendulum at its extreme, one is simply gathering momentum for the reversal, the plunge back toward a mood of possiblity. If happiness can be tempered by the knowledge that it won't last, then surely the opposite is also true.”
― Lindsay Stern, The Study of Animal Languages

“I used to think...,' I trail off. 'I used to think life would go like this: You get bashed around a bit, fuck up, lose people, and in the process figure out what really matters. But now...'
He sips from my water glass.
'It's more like figuring out that your life was never even about you, to begin with. You're not the hero. You're just someone in the cast.”
― Lindsay Stern

“I don't know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Yes, Montaigne,' I said, more firmly. 'Montaigne believed there was such a diversity of humans in the world - humans with different needs, different wants, different ways of being, different ways of experiencing reality - that there must also be a diversity of happiness. That happiness was, in other words, subjective, not objective. There is no universal human nature, and so there is also no universal human happiness. There is only what we each find.”
― Claire Standford

“This is the reason that Montaigne argues for a separation between public and private spheres - the subjective nature of happiness demands it. We each need space to try to achieve happiness privately, without interference from the public. Montaigne would be horrified, for example, at the proliferation of social media, where we take what we should, in his view, be private and make it public. Not only is it obscene, it doesn't serve us. We obscure our own happiness from ourselves by trying to project it and articulate it and prove it to others. These sites, he would say, flatten and falsify happiness when they ask us to affirm each other's life choices through likes.”
― Claire Standford

“Everyone everything has potential for magic. You just gotta be standing somewhere in the world and in the body that lets you see it.”
― Tillie Walden, Are You Listening?

“When something horrible happens, or something amazing...really, anything that's big, it makes you feel like mountains could shatter, or the sky could disappear...you know what I'm talking about? Well, most places, mountains stay put. Sky stays in one piece. Kind of cruel, really. But here, everything is listening.”
― Tillie Walden, Are You Listening?

“I am afraid of the people I love hurting
me, and me not loving myself
enough to stop them.”
― Olivia A. Cole, Ariel Crashes a Train

“If you have no idea about anything, she says, then I think you're on the right track. If you though you had it all figured out, that's when I'd be worried. Look at it this way: not you have less to unlearn.”
― Olivia A. Cole, Ariel Crashes a Train

“I know how it feels
to be on a ride and think you'll never get off”
― Olivia A. Cole, Ariel Crashes a Train