Ann > Ann's Quotes

“Being a girl in this world means being afraid. That fear'll keep you safe. It'll keep you alive.”
― Meredith Russo, If I Was Your Girl

“Brave doesn't mean you're not scared. It means you go on even though you're scared.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Intentions always look better on paper than in reality.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
― Emily Dickinson

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“If readers discount certain topics as unworthy of their attention, if readers are going to judge a book by its cover or feel excluded from a certain kind of book because the cover is, say, pink, the failure is with the reader, not the writer. To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance,”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“She is just a woman who life has made different. This is her strange way of trying to love you.”
― Shyam Selvadurai, The Hungry Ghosts

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”
― Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
― Yukio Mishima

“i knew she'd leave me. i figure we might as well go somewhere memorable to fall apart”
― Felicia Luna Lemus, Like Son

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling

“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“I'm a woman. That means I break hard. And mend like a motherfucker; all sexy and full of heartbreakingly beautiful scars.”
― Staceyann Chin

“Miles of junk to throw out -- how do you decide what to keep when everything is sentiment.”
― Staceyann Chin

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“I’m dying twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five
This disturbs me,
but I try not to show it in public.”
― Essex Hemphill

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― audre lorde

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“I don’t know who I am when I’m not trying to pretend everything’s OK,”
― Corinne Duyvis, Otherbound

“I can always recognize the fellow wounded.”
― Suzette Mayr, Monoceros

“You folk are so finicky about time, living it in straight lines like that.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place