Emma > Emma's Quotes

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“One must not be shy where language is concerned.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”
― Sarah Kendzior

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Maxine makes me read her Indian stuff that I don’t always get. I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not gonna hurt as much anymore.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.”
― Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

“It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin' mystery.”
― Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

“The trouble with being the type of person who would do anything for love was that you would do anything for love.”
― Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

“As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and pass it down to generations.”
― Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Most of what she knew, she'd learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would. If consequences resulted from her behaving differently then they too were functions of life's fundamental core. Tate's devotion eventually convinced her that human love is more than the bizarre mating competitions of the marsh creatures. But life also taught her than ancient genes for survival still persist in undesirable forms among the twists and turns of man's genetic code. For Kya it was enough to be part of this natural sequence as sure as the tides. Kya was bonded to her planet and its life in a way few people are. Rooted solid in this earth. Born of this mother.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“You took me on because I was helpful in your political cause. Because I could aid in your experiments. Beyond that I was of no use to you, and so you abandoned me.” I struggled to get my breath. “I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men.”
― Esi Edugyan, Washington Black