afin > afin's Quotes

“You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special - which is fair, who doesn’t - but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life/Social Studies

“I believe that the things you notice -- that you love, that make you pause -- make up who you are. And so it feels, in a way, like those things are a part of you, even though they are outside of you. Which makes me wonder if it would be more accurate to say, perhaps, that a piece of you is kept alive by a part of them.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The memories I stored, I could not let festered. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared I was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, and in every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance. But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. You know when something is done, I tell them (they always want to know how to know when something is done), when you know the argument for every single choice, when not a single apostrophe has slipped by uninterrogated, when every word has been swapped for its synonym and then recovered. I don’t mean to take the fun out of creation, or even to impose my own laborious process on them, but I actually believe this. Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope,”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“I have found that a fulfilling writing life is one in which the creative process merges with the other necessary processes of good living, which only the individual can define.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life. Let this book be a totem of permission, encouragement, proof, whatever you need it to be.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“The resistance to memoirs about trauma is in many respects a reiteration of the classic role of perpetrator: to deny, discredit, and dismiss victims in order to avoid being implicated or losing power. Anyone who writes the story of their individual trauma, and especially those of identities that have been historically oppressed and abused, is subject to the retraumatization by ongoing perpetrators: the patriarchal, white supremacist, colonizing nation(s) in which they must live and learn to heal.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“Growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change -Clary Fray”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Sorry, No conprendo I don't speak Loser.”
― Lisi Harrison, The Clique

“It is an occupational hazard that anyone who has spent her life learning how to lie eventually becomes bad at telling the truth.”
― Ally Carter, Heist Society

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“It's funny how someone's perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.”
― Sarah Dessen, Dreamland

“If you didn't love him, this never would have happened. But you did. And accepting that love and everything that followed it is part of letting it go.”
― Sarah Dessen, Dreamland