Dea > Dea's Quotes

“Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“I gave up practically the whole world for you,” I tell him, walking through the front door of my own love story. “The sun, stars, ocean, trees, everything, I gave it all up for you.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“From what I understood, love was an extreme idea. A word that seemed to force something undefinable into the prison of letters. But the word was used so easily, so often. People spoke of love so casually, just to mean the slightest pleasure or thanks.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“To borrow Granny’s description, a bookstore is a place densely populated with tens of thousands of authors, dead or living, residing side by side. But books are quiet. They remain dead silent until somebody flips open a page. Only then do they spill out their stories, calmly and thoroughly, just enough at a time for me to handle.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I'd never met and lives I'd never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn't experienced could all be found in those volumes.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“One flesh, one end, bitch.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“The funny thing about their father was that he wasn’t cold, or at least not always. Mercurial was how she would describe him. Changeable as the weather. And like the weather, he had to be regularly checked to work out what kind of day they were going to have. Lucky and her sisters could tell his mood by the way he closed the front door. Just like you wouldn’t have a picnic in a hailstorm, you couldn’t do certain things around an angry dad. No bickering over the remote, no chatting loudly with friends on the phone, no crying over a bad grade, no laughing over a silly joke, no whining to their mom that they were hungry. He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“But if you think about it, that just isn’t true. What do you think?” she asked. “About what?” I asked. “That kind of thinking, I guess. Spirituality, natural living, all of it. It’s all so narrow-minded, you know? To me, it’s crazy. I don’t care what we’re talking about—God, divine providence, nature, some super-energy, the universe . . . Why would any force like that ever get caught up with stupid tiny human beings and their stupid, even tinier human problems?”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“Their so-called spirituality is completely self-serving, designed to make them happy, or make the people around them think they’ve found some kind of happiness. It’s this shallow belief in immediate profit. They go around talking about seeing something big. As if everything they feel, everything they’re thinking, is so big, bigger than all of us. That’s what they do. They act like they’re all big, ready to share their happiness with everyone, when the only happiness they care about is their own. Like, why can’t they just keep all that stuff to themselves and leave the rest of us alone?”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“She was outside for hours – almost seven, so she was told. You have no idea at all of the passing of time. You install or repair whatever you are tasked to install or repair; you photograph some of the hatches, the external tools, you do a litter-pick of debris, plucking from space a few of these tens of thousands of remnants of jettisoned or exploded satellites and launch-vehicle stages and craft; wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first. It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view, just as the sculpting force of gravity has made a sphere of the planet and pushed and pulled the tides which shape the coasts, so has politics sculpted and shaped and left evidence of itself everywhere.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“When he thinks of the six of them here, or the astronauts now going to the moon, he hears that haunting call – that’s what we’re doing when we come into space, asserting our species by extending its territory. Space is the one remaining wilderness we have. The solar system into which we venture is just the new frontier now our earthly frontiers have been discovered and plundered. That’s all this great human endeavour of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration, a bid for survival. A looping song sent into the open, a territorial animal song.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“Making lists is what Chie would do when she was a child, when she was disturbed or anxious.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital