Em > Em's Quotes

“I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any sweetness, expensive.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Reinette: One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.”
― Steven Moffat

“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“He had reached the point where he had to choose, for when first youth is past -- early or late in accordance with each person's individuality -- then, early or late, dawns the day when Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to forego the impossible and be content. And Resignation has much in her favor; for how often have not the idealistic aspirations of youth been beaten back, its enthusiasms been shamed, its hopes laid waste! The ideals, the fair and beautiful, have lost nothing of their radiance, but they no longer walk here among us as in the early days of our youth.”
― Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

“I knock on the glass panel, softly. My heart is beating like crazy. I am afraid of nothing, so why be so frightened? Why? Because everything scares me, because both fear and desire are busy equivocating with each other, with me, I can't even tell the difference between wanting him to open the door and hoping he's stood me up.”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“Seeing you here is like waking from a twenty-year coma ... Your face in the mirror is as white as Rip Van Winkle's. But here's the catch: you're still twenty years younger than those gathered around you, which is why I can be twenty-four in a second -- I am twenty-four.”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“It was never dark enough, the enormous sky flashing with August light rushing into the emptiest rooms, the loneliest windows. The month of falling stars.”
― Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories

“How strange we are. How different we are from how we think we are.”
― Sara Majka, Cities I've Never Lived In

“What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“I knew then that whatever I chose to do in life, I wanted to feel that way about it. Whatever it was, I wanted to love it so much it was worth considerable risk. I wouldn't let an addiction to gravity hold me back.”
― Dana Czapnik, The Falconer

“How old do you have to get to stop feeling like something magical is just around the corner?”
― Dana Czapnik, The Falconer

“There is one more way I time travel back to my father. When I was little he told me that air particles stay in our atmosphere for such a long time that we breathe the same air as the people who lived thousands of years ago. I think about that often now. I can take a deep breath and know that some fraction of those particles were once breathed by my dad. What an intimate thing it is to breathe the air of someone you loved.”
― Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World