Wendy Abrego > Wendy's Quotes

“Lonely, ain't it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.'
'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“We was girls together”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“You said I killed you-haunt me, then! [...] Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
― emily bronte

“Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! how can I bear it?" was the first sentence he uttered, in a tone that did not seek to disguise his despair. And now he stared at her so earnestly that I thought the very intensity of his gaze would bring tears into his eyes; but they burned with anguish: they did not melt.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves

“I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour
to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my
world.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You do not,’ cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.’ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Maybe being their child simply means that I will always feel the weight of their past.”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do

“Proximity and closeness are not the same.”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do

“To understand how my father became the way he was, I had to learn what happened to him as a little boy. It took a long time to learn the right questions to ask.”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do

“Má leaves me but I'm not alone, and a terrifying thought creeps into my head. Family is now something I have created and not just something I was born into.”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do

“How much of ME is my own and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do

“Every casualty in war is someone's grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover.”
― Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do