Alicia Tapia > Alicia's Quotes

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“He was not living his life; life was living him”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Grandpapa used to say, about difficulties he had gone through, 'It did not kill me, it made me knowledgeable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Darkness descended upon him, and when it lifted he knew that he would never see Kainene again and that his life would always be a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“I convinced myself that all the kids are going to be smarter than I am because they went to better schools. I got stuck in this horrible loop. I became completely preoccupied until I focused on my breathing and surroundings, and forced myself to write a list of reasons why that was untrue: 1) The school would not have accepted me if they didn't think I could succeed. 2) I've read about a million books. 3) I'll work really hard. 4) Mr. Ingman says I'm the best student he's ever had. 5) Most people aren't really that smart”
― Erika L. Sánchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

“It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Libraries may embody our notion of permanence, but their patrons are always in flux. In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“I will try not to judge because I have no idea what you were struggling with in your heart, what complicated your soul. None of us are just one thing, I guess.”
― Randy Ribay, Patron Saints of Nothing

“If we are to be more than what we have been, there's so much that we need to say. Salvation through honesty, I guess.”
― Randy Ribay, Patron Saints of Nothing

“We all have the terrible and amazing power to hurt and help, to harm and heal. We all do both throughout our lives. That’s the way it is. I suppose we just go on and do the best we can and try to do more good than bad using our time in Earth.”
― Randy Ribay, Patron Saints of Nothing

“My family, myself, this world — all of us are flawed. But flawed doesn’t mean hopeless. It doesn’t mean forsaken. It doesn’t mean lost.”
― Randy Ribay, Patron Saints of Nothing

“I don't see color, man,' he says. 'We're all one race: the human race. That's all I meant.'
'No it's not,' I say. And even if it is, that's kind of fucked up. First, to assume white is default. Second to imply that difference equals bad instead of simply different.”
― Randy Ribay, Patron Saints of Nothing

“The most important part of the body ain't the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“To be alive is to be missing.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power of the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.”
― Bell Hooks

“When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain “power over” us is the loss of their capacity to give and receive love. Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When lies erode trust, genuine connection cannot take place. While men who dominate others can and do experience ongoing care, they place a barrier between themselves and the experience of love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love's path is communication.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“She’d tell her because, in spite of everything, Loretta was her only friend in the world. Because she knew that, if it came down to her word versus Loretta’s, she would always be believed. And knowing this, she felt, for the first time, truly white.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class

“Whether the criticism of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments expressed by the leaders of the women’s rights movement was justifiable or not is still being debated. But one thing seems clear: their defense of their own interests as white middle-class women—in a frequently egotistical and elitist fashion—exposed the tenuous and superficial nature of their relationship to the postwar campaign for Black equality. Granted, the two Amendments excluded women from the new process of enfranchisement and were thus interpreted by them as detrimental to their political aims. Granted, they felt they had as powerful a case for suffrage as Black men. Yet in articulating their opposition with arguments invoking the privileges of white supremacy, they revealed how defenseless they remained—even after years of involvement in progressive causes—to the pernicious ideological influence of racism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class

“The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“But last year, things changed, & so did I.
So did chess. & if the game taught me one thing,

it's once you lift a pawn off the board,
you have to move it forward. It cannot return where it was.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

“If you are not from an island.
you cannot understand
what it means to be of water:

to learn to curve around the bend,
to learn to rise with rain,
to learn to quench an outside thirst

while all the while
you grow shallow
until there is not one drop

left for you.

I know this is what Tia does not say.
Sand & soil & sinew & smiles:
all bartered. & who reaps? Who eats?

Not us. Not me.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

“They are beautiful. I love them. I love you. You are the only thing that does not hurt.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land