Ryann Riggs > Ryann's Quotes

“You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed. My darling.”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“The world you live in is much bigger than that. If the place in which you find yourself is too painful, I say you should be free to seek another, less painful place of refuge. There is no shame in seeking a safe place. I want you to believe that somewhere in this wide world there is a place for you, a safe haven.”
― Kanae Minato, Confessions

“But doing something good or remarkable isn't easy. It's much easier to condemn people who do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing yourself.”
― Kanae Minato, Confessions

“When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why. I found that arrogant and infuriating, not to mention a pain in the neck. Sometimes I even wanted to hit them with a shovel to shut them up, like I did that time in elementary school. But I recalled how upset my sister had been when I’d casually mentioned this to her before and kept my mouth shut.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“I find the shape of people’s eyes particularly interesting when they’re being condescending. I see a wariness or a fear of being contradicted or sometimes a belligerent spark ready to jump on any attack.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“She might have said, I am not who you think I am. She might have said, I am experiencing a dislocation of reality.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“Horror films had taught her that a person could will a thing into existence, but once it was outside their consciousness, the consciousness that had been busily inventing simultaneous possibilities, it became a force unto itself, ferocious and uncontrollable.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― 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

“How long until I am the recipient of my own discoveries and not their messenger?”
― Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Hex

“If there's a pillar in your life, it's worth removing it. Break down your life and see what broke. If you were to imagine the three most essential elements of your days and then imagine your days without them, what comes rushing to take their place? It's so quiet when you bust down your acoustic paneling. Sometimes the body wants to be burned and sometimes it doesn't; self-neglect isn't infinite it's cyclical, as self-care is. Every time you get to a binary choice there's a third. Have you ever walked out with nothing to give but your innermost energy? Have you ever been nothing other than a crayon? We don't love most of the people we love. You're not who you thought I was.”
― Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Hex

“I look at you and I see how absolutely each person is afflicted, regardless of station, by envy. How envy is the best distraction from the completeness of our own lives. How longing is sacred and envy is rotten longing. How hard we are on our own happiness and how generous we are toward just about anyone else, how willing we are to believe that anyone else knows how.”
― Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Hex

“I empty myself of my life and my life remains.”
― Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Hex

“Let me remove my laces. I’ll hand you these notebooks, stacked and tied and knotted. Call it a compendium. It is my lab work, my evidence, my chart, and if it repulses you, walk into your repulsion wearing the great badge of honor of one who has been seen. We’re starting into our new days now.”
― Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Hex

“It’s going to be okay, this solitude, this lovelessness, this schoollessness, this unstructure, this floating, this sinking.”
― Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Hex

“Yes, you're changing. But the best parts of you are still here.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“But sometimes I wonder if you are right and if all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions.”
― Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

“I read books now to bring myself to a feeling. When I walk down the street I'm never sure if I interact with others, or if they interact with me”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“Forgive me if I add something more about myself since my identity is not very clear, and when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny. Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster of is this what it means to be a person?”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“This is the place where your life unfolds. You push something back so the other thing can come forward. This thing is anything, or it is nothing, and you see it be nothing.”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“I am the reflection of someone who is dying. When I am looked at, it's not me that is seen. I am a giant mirror. You are too. See that woman lying down in the road? When you are in front of her, she is reflected in your eyes.

To become a giant mirror, to stand in the middle of the wind knowing that's all you are.”
― Amina Cain, Creature

“Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.”
― Amina Cain, Indelicacy

“And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes”

says the man with a cart of empty bottles at the corner of church
and lincoln while I stare into my phone and I say
I know oh I know while trying to find the specific
filter that will make the sun’s near-flawless descent look

the way I might describe it in a poem and the man
says the moment is already right in front of you and I
say I know but everyone I love is not here and I mean
here like on this street corner with me while I turn

the sky a darker shade of red on my phone and I mean
here like everyone I love who I can still touch and not
pass my fingers through like the wind in a dream
but I look up at the man and he is a kaleidoscope

of shadows I mean his shadows have shadows
and they are small and trailing behind him and I know
then that everyone he loves is also not here and the man doesn’t ask
but I still say hey man I’ve got nothing I’ve got nothing even though I have plenty

to go home to and the sun is still hot even in its
endless flirt with submission and the man’s palm has a small
river inside I mean he has taken my hand now and here we are
tethered and unmoving and the man says what color are you making

the sky and I say what I might say in a poem I say all surrender
ends in blood and he says what color are you making the sky and
I say something bright enough to make people wish they were here
and he squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying

light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are
and I’m sure I did once too but I can’t prove it to anyone these days
and he says the end isn’t always about what dies and I know I know
or I knew once and now I write about beautiful things

like I will never touch a beautiful thing again and the man
looks me in the eyes and he points to the blue-orange vault
over heaven’s gates and he says the face of everyone you miss
is up there and I know I know I can’t see them but I know

and he turns my face to the horizon and he says
we don’t have much time left and I get that he means the time
before the sun is finally through with its daily work or I
think I get that but I still can’t stop trembling and I close

my eyes and I am sobbing on the corner of church and
lincoln and when I open my eyes the sun is plucking everyone
who has chosen to love me from the clouds and carrying them
into the light-drunk horizon and I am seeing this and I know
I am seeing this the girl who kissed me as a boy in the dairy aisle

of meijer while our parents shopped and the older boy on the
basketball team who taught me how to make a good fist and swing
it into the jaw of a bully and the friends who crawled to my porch

in the summer of any year I have been alive they were all there
I saw their faces and it was like I was given the eyes of a newborn
again and once you know what it is to be lonely it is hard to
unsee that which serves as a reminder that you were not always

empty and I am gasping into the now-dark air and I pull my shirt
up to wipe whatever tears are left and I see the man walking in the
other direction and I chase him down and tap his arm and I say did
you see it did you see it like I did and he turns and leans into the

glow of a streetlamp and he is anchored by a single shadow now
and he sneers and he says have we met and he scoffs and pushes
his cart off into the night and I can hear the glass rattling even
as I watch him become small and vanish and I look down at my

phone and the sky on the screen is still blood red.”
― Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

“I am the priestess of a secret that I no longer know. And I serve out of blissful ignorance.

I found out something I was unable to understand, my lips became sealed, and I retained only the incomprehensible fragments of a ritual.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I don't want beauty, I want identity.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.