Kristine > Kristine's Quotes

“Love doesn't erase the past, but it makes the future different.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages Singles Edition

“Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages Singles Edition

“We girls. Afraid of the wrong things, at the wrong times. Afraid of a burned face, when outside, outside waiting for you are fires you cannot imagine. Men, holding matches up to your gasoline eyes. Flames, flames all around you, licking at your just-born breasts, your just-bled body. And infernos. Infernos as wide as the world. Waiting to impoverish you, make you ash, and even the wind, even the wind. Even the wind, my dear, she thought, watching you burn, willing it, passing over you, and through you. Scattering you, because you are a girl, and because you are ash.”
― Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter

“Forget what I said about a woman who won't listen. The worst thing is a woman who knows what she wants.”
― Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter

“Well, with Mohan, it was even clearer - there could be no love without fear. The two had always been bound for her, she realized, fear and love, always, but just there, floating on the edge of wake and sleep, another thought drifted up, as if from the cloth that was tucked into her pillow: the thought that maybe there had been one exception. Maybe once, just for a short time, in her girlhood, they had been separate. For a short time (she was already snoring, beginning to dream), she had loved Poornima, and in that love, she had felt no fear.”
― Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter

“Understand this Poornima: that it's better to be swallowed whole than in pieces.”
― Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter

“He wears a Stetson so clean you could eat a sandwich off the brim. All hat, no cattle. Keith leaned forward and looked me right in the eye,. Family's been in Texas since forever. Probably got a whole cedar chest full of white hoods in the attic.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Glory opens her mouths, closes it. She shakes her head and looks at her cigarette. I was attacked by a man out in the oil patch.
God damn it all, Tina says, and after a long pause, I'm sorry.
I got in his truck and went with him.
Well hell, sugar, Tina says. That don't mean jack. That evil belongs to him, it's got nothing to do with you.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“Glory looks at the two small scars on her hands, one in the center of each palm, the body doing its work. [...] The girl who stood up and fell back down, who grabbed onto a barbed wire fence and stopped herself from falling again. The girl who walked barefoot across the desert and saved her own life. She can't imagine any other way to tell the story.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“In the church where I grew up, we were taught that sin, even if it happens only in your heart, condemns you all the same. Grace is not assured to any of us, maybe not even most of us, and while being saved gives you a fighting chance, you must always hope that the sin lodged in your heart, like a bullet that cannot be removed without killing you, is not of the mortal kind.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“But of all the things Victor learned during the war -- that living to see another day is almost always a matter of stupid luck, that men who know they might die any minute can learn not to give a shit about who's the All-Star and who's the Mexican, or that heroism is most often small and accidental but it still means the world -- the greatest lesson was this: nothing causes more suffering than vengeance. And Victor has no taste for it, not even as the sole witness to his niece's suffering.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“The air between us is not empty space.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“Take stock of who we are, and what we have, and then use it for good.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“Humans need community, for our emotional health. We need connection, a sense of belonging. We are not built to thrive in isolation.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“So much could be solved, she thinks, if we simply held hands with each other more often.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“There was no reason for what happened to you, Eddie. You could have died; you just didn’t. It was dumb luck. Nobody chose you for anything. Which means, truly, that you can do anything.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“Everything ends,” she says. “That’s nothing to be sad about. What matters is what starts in that moment.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“It feels unkind that they are shoving their emotions at him when his own sadness and fear are so vast that he has to hide from them.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“I'll do this," John says. "I'll let you know what's out there, within limits. But I want you to understand that there can't be information about you--that is true--that you don't already know. Your life takes place in your skin. No one else knows a goddamn thing, and the Internet is full of cowboys and sad people making stuff up." He pauses. "I love the Internet, or at least I used to, but it's not where you go for the truth.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“He’s winded by the sentence, as if the truth has taken something from him.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” —PEMA CHÖDRÖN”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“This was not a tragedy. Dying on your couch watching TV by yourself is a tragedy. Dying while doing something you love with every part of your body is magic. I wish you magic, Edward.”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

“It helped that Celia Ray could walk into a joint like nobody I’ve ever seen. She would throw her resplendence into a room ahead of her, the way a soldier might throw a grenade into a machine gunner’s nest, and then she would follow her beauty right on in and assess the carnage.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The house's disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father's absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“You had to finish a story to know all the answers, and life was no different. Nothing was ever handed to you from the start.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“The two men looked at each other for a moment. Then Sonja's father nodded. And Ove nodded curtly back. And then they rose to their feet, objective and determined, in the way two men might behave if they had just agreed to go and kill a third man.”
― Henning Koch, A Man Called Ove