Amy > Amy's Quotes

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“A weight grew in the air between Misty’s mother and her sisters, a weight that Misty couldn’t quite understand. So much of growing up was that way. A feeling in a room that she’d just walked into. A feeling hanging between two people that she loved. A sense of something gone slightly wrong, but when she asked, no one would tell her the truth. And that was where childhood lay, in the shadow of knowing that something was wrong but not knowing what it was or why it was or how to fix it, so she was left standing in front of her mother, her mother tired and bleeding, her mother with a ragged hole chewed through her chest, her mother saying, “It’s fine. Everything is fine.”
― Ashley Blooms, Every Bone a Prayer

“New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“But Ruth was wrong, too. There was more than just one other world beyond ours; there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and at 99 cents apiece I could rent them all.”
― Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.”
― Clive Barker

“With writing, we have second chances.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“If you're about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something vicious beforehand.”
― Helen Oyeyemi

“Ruth did not approve of young men. So noisy.”
― Kerry Greenwood, Murder In Montparnasse

“Phryne was getting out of the car. Dot closed her eyes. Miss Fisher was about to happen to someone again.”
― Kerry Greenwood, Dead Man's Chest

“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“You go on, I presume, with your latin Exercises: and I wish to hear of your beginning upon Sallust who is one of the most polished and perfect of the Roman Historians, every Period of whom, and I had almost said every Syllable and every Letter is worth Studying.

In Company with Sallust, Cicero, Tacitus and Livy, you will learn Wisdom and Virtue. You will see them represented, with all the Charms which Language and Imagination can exhibit, and Vice and Folly painted in all their Deformity and Horror.

You will ever remember that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.—This will ever be the Sum total of the Advice of your affectionate Father,

John Adams”
― John Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

“Citizenship is more than an individual exchange of freedoms for rights; it is also membership in a body politic, a nation, and a community. To be deemed fair, a system must offer its citizens equal opportunities for public recognition, and groups cannot systematically suffer from misrecognition in the form of stereotype and stigma.”
― Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

“He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories

“Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories

“The English took my sword and dirk away,” he said softly. His finger touched the slugs that lay in my palm. “But Tom Gage put a weapon into my hands again, and I think I shall not lay it down.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Voyager

“But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“He was a mystery too boring to solve.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“Sometimes you just look at a person in that moment and think yes, they're going to be important to me. They're going to change the shape my life takes. We're going to mean something to each other.
This is the feeling I get as I watch Brigid try to fold an entire meat-lover's pizza in half, give up, and stack four slices directly on top of one another to shove them into her mouth.”
― Kristen O'Neal, Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses

“I'm a half-finished map and I'm always trying to plot my points, and I won't have anyone do it for me.”
― Jessie Burton, Medusa

“My necromancer and I always liked you...and hey, what’s like except a love that hasn’t been invited indoors?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“She was Harrowhark alone in front of the mirror again: a nonsense, a monster, an alien geometry. A loathsome squawk of a person. She was nine, and she’d made a mistake. She was seventeen, and she’d made a mistake. Time had repeated itself. Harrow would be tripping over herself for her whole existence, a frictionless hoop of totally fucking up.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“She took the spyglass from a nearby shelf and held it to her eye. The world was a vast black emptiness, echoing like the mordant spaces between soul-wrought words...

Ned leaned across and removed the lens cap, and poetry became science again.”
― India Holton, The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels

“Horror's not a symptom, it's a love affair.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw