Lily > Lily's Quotes

“on the 11th of every month my friend elizabeth would say, "well we made it through another month. so do we get her back now?" we always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. its not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.

we expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. we figured that we'd said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. we'd passed the test and would get back what we'd lost. but instead, every anniversary hurt more, and every anniversary felt like she was further away from coming back. the idea that there wouldn't be a final goodbye- that was a hard goodbye in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. no private eye has to tell you it's a long goodbye.

...the loss just doesn't go away- it gets bigger the longer you look at it.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“This was not a faerie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.”
― Francesca Lia Block

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.”
― Anne Sexton

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for what it is: just behavior.”
― Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You

“How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something”
― Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You

“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

“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Was I like honey thinking it's a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“Black people actually have to PROVE their humanity, instead of having it accepted as a given.”
― Luvvie Ajayi, I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual

“White women have been shielded from culpability all their lives and through history and have been able to move in the system of oppression without getting blame when they have been active participants in the denigration of people of color and marginalized people. They have been the Damsel in Distress even as they’ve been the source of chaos.”
― Luvvie Ajayi, I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual