Diana Saenz > Diana's Quotes

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“Dime algo que yo no sepa:
por ejemplo
(...)que llegas tarde a todos los sitios
porque vives en el pasado.”
― Elvira Sastre

“A ti podría decirte
que para mí
cualquier lugar
es mi casa
si eres tú
quien abre
la puerta.”
― Elvira Sastre, Baluarte

“Pero la poesía no salva,
sólo da sentido a las heridas.”
― Elvira Sastre, Cuarenta y tres maneras de soltarse el pelo

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“All those layers of silence upon silence.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The first of many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man's hands after hours spent in a wood shop.”
― Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

“Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Take a drink every time you hear you’re not enough.
Not the right fit.
Not the right look.
Not the right focus.
Not the right drive.
Not the right time.
Not the right job.
Not the right path.
Not the right future.
Not the right present.
Not the right you.
Not you.
(Not me?)
There’s just something missing.
From us.
What could I have done?
Nothing. It’s just…
(Who you are.)
I didn’t think we were serious.
(You’re just too…
…sweet.
…soft.
…sensitive.)
I just don’t see us ending up together.
I met someone.
I’m sorry
It’s not you.
Swallow it down.
We’re not on the same page.
We’re not in the same place.
It’s not you.
We can’t help who we fall in love with.
(And who we don’t.)
You’re such a good friend.
You’re going to make the right girl happy.
You deserve better.
Let’s stay friends.
I don’t want to lose you.
It’s not you.
I’m sorry.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I’ve
plagiarized my life
to give you the best
of me”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night's fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of depts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I made you into my private Christ, supplicated with my own dark devotions. Nothing existed beyond the range of your exacting gaze, not even me. I was simply a non-entity when you weren't looking at me, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the sweet water of your attention.
A woman can't live like that, my Lord. No one can. Don't ask me why I did it.
God, forgive me.
Christ, forgive me.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I was tired of carrying around the weight of a love like worship, of sickly-warm rush of idolatry coloring my whole world.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“I denied it,
this new land. But love, I’ll concede this:
whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird,
the loud, obvious blur of song people point to
when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things: Poems

“Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I
was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights