Ivana Stefanova > Ivana's Quotes

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn't changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“They can’t make us go away just
because they are done with us”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Why do I have to be nice when most of the men aren’t?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Some men's childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Is it better to speak or die?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“. . . love, which happens only once in life, and thereafter is never quite spontaneous or impulsive.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I don't know then that one day I won't be seventeen. I don't know that youth doesn't last, that it's only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it's too late. It's finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don't listen. Their words roll over me but don't stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck's back. I'm an idiot. An easygoing idiot.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“It’s just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can’t have. It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“Some people may be brokenhearted not because they’ve been hurt but because they’ve never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“As the French poet says, Le temps d’apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it’s already too late.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“I wanted them to see perfection. I ached for it in the deep, dark core of me: to be so good I left other people in the dust.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“But no matter how much I tried to cling to the shining jewels of my accomplishments, it never took long before my shadow list surfaced. Everything I’d ever failed at, every second place, every rejection, mounting, mounting, mounting, until the suspicion became unbearable. (...) My life was a narrative I couldn’t parse, full of conflicting evidence.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“It was strange, really, how your entire life could change just like that, from one second to the next. And there was no fireworks show, no dramatic tilting of the world on its axis to signify how everything had suddenly flipped upside down, and nothing would ever be the same.”
― Ashley Winstead, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

“I didn’t want to be in the world, around all those people who didn’t read books, who didn’t think they were important.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I loved that the complexities of my emotions were understood by authors writing hundreds of years ago, I loved looking at their texts and trying to understand what they were aiming to do, to pull my own meaning from them, to point out what others didn’t see or notice—the repetition of blue imagery, the recapitulation of motifs of separation. I was good at that.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I don't think," he insisted. "I feel.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“What is better than believing you are heading towards love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you're scared of what it means to do so.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend