Lei > Lei's Quotes

“I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a center of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sometimes I feel dead," I told her, "and I hate everybody.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Sam's doctor said to him, "The good news is that the pain is in your head."
But I am in my head, Sam thought.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“What's everyone talking about?"
"The end of The Iliad."
"That's the best part," Marx said.
"Why is it the best part?" Sadie asked.
"Because it's perfect," Marx said. "'Tamer of horses' is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn't have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand." Dov shook his head. "Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“It seemed very remarkable that you could travel halfway around the world and still end up looking at some ducks.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“At the same time, it seemed certain to me that someday I would really want to hear his voice and wouldn't be able to, and I would think back to the time that he had invited me to call him, and it would seem as incomprehensible as an invitation to speak to the dead.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot