Rachel Chafin > Rachel's Quotes

“But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.”
― Bryan Stevenson

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“when two aliebns find each other in a strange place, it feels a little more like home.”
― Jomny Sun, Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Basketball rule #3
Never let anyone
lower your goals.
Others’ expectations
of you are determined
by their limitations
of life.
The sky is your limit, sons.
Always shoot
for the sun
and you will shine.”
― Kwame Alexander, The Crossover

“At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“We are small, but the universe is not.”
― Brian K. Vaughan

“Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?”
― Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight

“Hope in the shadow of fear is the world's most powerful motivator.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“Every relationship is an education....


There's no graduating from this kind of education, couples just keep growing and changing until they either break up or die.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 5

“Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job --- not a calling.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Basketball Rule #10

A loss is inevitable,
like snow in winter.
True champions
learn
to dance
through
the storm.”
― Kwame Alexander, The Crossover

“The real scam is that being bones isn’t enough either. The game is rigged. There is no perfection.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don't turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Forget Regret, or life is yours to miss”
― Jonathan Larson, Rent

“Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over London was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“Give in to love or live in fear.”
― Jonathan Larson

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Death doesn't discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes, and we keep living anyway....”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda

“but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“[BURR]
I am the one thing in life I can control.”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: The Revolution

“I wear my mistakes like badges of honor, and I celebrate them.”
― Amy Schumer, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

“If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a family is more like a rope. We're lots of fragile little strands, and we survive by becoming hopelessly intertwined with each other.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 7