Meredith > Meredith's Quotes

“Then the Lord must be mightily displeased with you, because he has led you into the valley of death. Make peace with your Lord before it is too late, because the hungry ones are coming for you.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“For you, a thousand times over”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“On the ground, the now handless woman with the ax in her skull lay staring into oblivion. I envied her.”
― Ryan C. Thomas, The Summer I Died

“At first, suicide was just a word, a vague idea separate from reality. It pointed at a way that other people chose to die, people I didn't even know. But once the word became my own, it took on the strangest shape. I could feel it growing deep inside of me. Suicide wasn't something that happened to strangers. I could make it happen, if I wanted to.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Because despite the torture he’d been put through, the pain and loss he did not believe he had done anything to deserve, he had tried to be a decent person, tried to stay within the confines of morality. And all it had gotten him was more suffering.”
― Kealan Patrick Burke, Sour Candy

“For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been building you a House out of my own bones. And still, you look at me with so much contempt and mistrust. You complain because there are gaps in the roof of my ribs, and you ask me to give more of myself to fill them. You want my hips to be the bowl you drink from. My shoulders, your bed. My arms, your walls. My legs, the very ground you stand on. You want your fill of my blood whenever you crave it. What more do you want from me?”
― Alexis Henderson, House of Hunger

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to 'make it home safe.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“No matter how bleak or dire, end-of-the-world scenarios appeal to us because we take meaning from the end... there's also undeniable allure to witnessing the beginning of the end and perishing alone with everyone and everything else.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“I could either abandon the doubts I beheld and be free, or else dwell in the eye of the prejudiced, to be chained there. There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“She talked about wanting to be a part of something, wanting to be desired, to be 'special', craving to be loved. She talked about experiencing the kind of loneliness so immense it could swallow you up. She called it 'loneliness that crowds couldn't cure'.”
― Cupcake Brown, A Piece of Cake

“Hell is crammed full of godly men.”
― Brian Evenson, Father of Lies

“A lifetime thus far of being alone. Of knowing I would be alone, forever. To stand in a full room and know oneself to be apart, that invisible barrier between you and them to be in every way uncrossable. To find the will to exist in a world so wholly unsuited for you.”
― CJ Leede, Maeve Fly

“Here is the truth, the one that so few of us know:
You do not need a moral and noble story to do what you want.
You do not first need to be a victim to become a monster.”
― C.J. Leede, Maeve Fly

“It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.”
― Ryu Murakami , Audition

“Nice person, bad person -- that's not the level this girl is at. I can see you're crazy about her and probably won't be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you'd be better off staying away from someone like her. I can't read her exactly, but I can tell you she's either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.”
― Ryū Murakami, Audition

“Was it my idea to have him hurt me, or did he just let me think it was?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“I explain to him that nothing matters, and nothing lasts. Everyone forgets, and everything disappears. The things you do, the things you are; it’s all nothing. Would anyone miss you, if you went away? Would anyone look for you? Would anyone listen, or even care, if I hurt you? If I put my hands around your neck and crushed your windpipe and chopped you up, would anyone find you? And if it’s a no to any of these, did you even exist in the first place?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“Man is born into sin. All because of Adam.”
Guillaume said, “Mostly Eve, my priest told us.”
Delphine looked up from the water now.
“That’s not fair.”
“How’s that?” said Guillaume.
“She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”
― Christopher Buehlman, Between Two Fires

“Humans and monsters both understand stories about magic and marvel and myth are made interesting by their stemming from trauma and violence and blood. How can one grow without pain?”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Mermaids were beautiful, and was I not also beautiful? Alluring? A creature of the water? Not of salt like the mermaids in the book, but of chlorine.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Do you understand the world I lived in? How my mutilations were a gift?”
― Jade Song, Chlorine