Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Everyone looked better at a distance. Everyone sounded sweetest when you did not have to hear them talk too long.”
― Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

“You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, "now I will remove my knife slowly - so let things be easy and clean; let there be no mess." There will always be blood.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.
That is the tale; the rest is detail.
There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.
Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat. There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy, as the earth is cleansed of its pests.
Leave him; he cuts too deep. He is too close to us and it hurts.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“To find a way, or make your own.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She hadn't realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“A town always looked different once you'd returned, like a house where all the furniture had shifted three inches. You wouldn't mistake it for a stranger's house but you'd keeping banging your shins on the table corners.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“A girl was like a kite; without her mother's strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Fear, Leni learned, was not the small dark closet she'd always imagined; walls pressed in close, a ceiling you bumped your head on, a floor cold to the touch.
No.
Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.”
― Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

“The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted. a”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“My default is to be really critical of myself, but the world will do that for me, so I gotta make sure I always know I have my back.”
― Jonathan Van Ness, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love

“If I’d known then what I know now, I would have told my little baby self that being strong and masculine has everything to do with having the courage and audacity to be different. It’s such a better way to be a man—bold and courageous—than squashing it down and trying to fit into a very basic idea of how men are supposed to be. Not to mention that the concepts around masculinity are as tired as the day is long.”
― Jonathan Van Ness, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love

“Just because we mess up doesn’t mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect.”
― Jonathan Van Ness, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love

“Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human - the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He's experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“If anyone would understand loneliness, the moon would.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Time ensures children never know their parents young.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Sunsets are never simple.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing