Liz Hall > Liz's Quotes

“But the wild things cried, “Oh please don't go- We'll eat you up- we love you so!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!”
― Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity

“I am not untidy," I objected. "I merely surround myself with a plethora of possibilities.”
― Marthe Jocelyn

“It wasn't just a pastime. Our stories were drumming with power. Other people's memories transported us out of our places of exile, to rich, vibrant lands, and to home. They reminded us of the long, unknowable road. We couldn't see yet, fresh from our escape, but other sharp turns lay ahead. We had created our life's great story; next would come the waiting time, camp, where we would tell it.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“And while we grumble over what we are owed and how much we get to keep, the displaced wait at the door. They are painters and surgeons and craftsmen and students. Children. Mothers. The neighbor who made a good sauce. The funny girl from science class. The boy who can really dance. The great-uncle who always turns down the wrong street. They endure painful transformation, rising from death, discarding their faces and bodies, their identities, without guarantee of new ones.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“I learned to care about their stories and the aftermath of those stories. I learned that some stories are a joy to embellish and re-create (as in literature or gossip) and in others, the facts are vital (as in fights with little brothers, or asylum interviews), and that to believe or not believe, the "how" of the story matters in both cases.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Now I remember that at Iowa, a famous writer told us that we must taste life more than we write about it, that we shouldn't publish while in this preparatory bubble. When you're waiting for life to begin, you're prone to spectacle, to theater, and, as any asylum seeker who has looked into the cold eyes of an immigration officer knows, no one believes melodrama.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“She keeps saying that the facts are sacred. I keep saying that they're a tool -- that truth requires point of view, as well; it needs to be cobbled from facts.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“And thinking about it hypothetically doesn't change what you should do with your days. You must keep living. This is what I learned from her at Hotel Barba. You can't fall into the waiting space. You must find work, some small gear you can turn -- you must make something happen.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Stories are funny things. Even the mere idea of fiction. Facts exist. But I see now that facts are different than truth. Facts are supposed to be indisputable, unbending (at least until science tells us we were wrong about everything), but even the true stories of who we think ourselves to be are kind of fiction we create.”
― Samira Ahmed, Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

“I wasn't good at pretending, that was the thing. After what had happened in that burning house, given what went on there, I could see no point in being anything other than truthful with the world. I had, literally, nothing left to lose. But, by careful observation from the sidelines, I'd worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little. Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don't find very funny, or do things they don't particularly want to, with people whose company they don't particularly enjoy. Not me. I had decided, years ago, that if the choice was between that or flying solo, then I'd fly solo. It was safer that way. Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“It didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”
― Matt Haig, How To Stop Time: A Novel

“Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“I need to tame the past. That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky... But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren't we?”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“You can’t choose where you are born, you can’t decide who won’t leave you, you can’t choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.
In those monents that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be?
The future is you.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Every utopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a utopia.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow ride... to your final place of rest." He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“I used to worry about being more efficient. Now, I think, 'Why? What is velocity, and why is that the ultimate value of everything?' The process is really messy, but it's so fun--and you discover weird things that you can only get from just meandering through stuff.”
― Dana Spiotta

“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People