Melon > Melon's Quotes

“The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I can see us there still," he said, "for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them," he said, "despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.”
― Rachel Cusk

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“The obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“My father says persistence is a polite way of being annoying.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“Life offered few pleasures as affordable as a well-made bed.”
― Anthony Marra, Mercury Pictures Presents

“Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher's prophecy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It's strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“We get so used to twenty-four-year-old actors playing high school students, and we seem so mature in our own memories, that we forget actual teenagers have limited vocabularies, have bad posture and questionable hygiene, laugh too loud, don’t know how to dress for their body types, want chicken nuggets and macaroni for lunch. It’s easier to see the twelve-year-olds they just were than the twenty-year-olds they’ll soon be.”
― Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You

“I was back in love the instant I saw him. It's the strangest thing, isn't it, to find someone again after a great deal of time. Your brain resets itself to the last time you saw them.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them. A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is usually a dubious one:”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“Not all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have experienced fear because of men.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape. The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed. The fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this. The world that we believe in, that we're attempting to make real and tangible, is still not the world that exists.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,’ she said. ‘I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you’ve swallowed the universe? Not say so?”
― Elif Batuman

“Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or