Lin > Lin's Quotes

“The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake

“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Real children do not go hoppity skip unless they are on drugs.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”
― Margaret Atwood

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

“even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared, like I do when I’m standing on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head is so full of all these things that I’m afraid that I’m going to forget to stand up straight and hang on to the rail and I’m going to fall over and be killed.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time