Sofia Soter > Sofia's Quotes

“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“...oh boo hoo, everyone’s life was hard, and if you’d survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren't waiting for that at all.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves with almost no chance for reinvention.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“When do I stop? When I'm tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tell s you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“I’ve come to see “Bitches be crazy” as less a statement by men that women are crazy or even a reappropriated statement by women defending their own madness. Instead, I see the phrase and imagine a colon after “bitches,” rendering it a command to other women, a battle cry. It is a way of saying, “We took back ‘bitch’ already. And now we have come for ‘crazy.”
― Alana Massey, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

“Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.”
― Alana Massey, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.” I struggle to think of any line of thinking more linked to being a socialized female than to consider the declaration of simply existing to feel like a form of bragging. But that, of course, is the plight of the feeling girl: to be told again and again that her very existence is something not worth declaring.”
― Alana Massey, All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

“Name one hero who was happy."
I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back.
"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
"I can't."
"I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the reason. Swear it."
"I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
"I swear it," he echoed.
We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.
"I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I am nothing and will always be nothing, I have been living for a million years. I am dust, rock, an un-man.”
― Hache Pueyo