Nancy > Nancy's Quotes

“So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“The great revelation had never come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“That the future’s unspecified terms provide a few recognizable basics, and that I might find, somewhere in me, a tension—the good kind—for tapping into what springs me forward, is, I reason, the hope. The discord, the din, what stays the same, what reappears, what’s underneath, the misremembered and all there is to fathom. Growing up, for a long period that’s not worth mentioning here, I thought the expression was “Play it by year.” As in, take your time. A whole year. More. Whatever you need. There’s no rush.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“It is too much work to explain to them that you can stop and start again from nothing, that you can love the same person twice”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Let me in, enclose me, tell me who I was.”
― Margaret Atwood

“And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.”
― Margaret Atwood, Dearly

“And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I'm overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I'm watching the memory of them.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“A belief that it’s possible to let one’s guard down and enjoy the emotional knowledge that orbits a home and the memories, while not all good, that confirm her.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I think of that spring morning, just before dawn. how she appeared at my side on the bench. how I felt so suddenly alive with possibility. saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person I knew in my bones would be someone I’d love. how I had no idea. how the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing. maybe I could do it again. Imagine her back. live on the roofs and trees of my mind with another her beside me forever. take her mesh hand in mine and this time never let go”
― Mona Awad

“I can’t think about you anymore, the pain is swallowing me up. I have to put your memory away, like a precious sepia photograph. There are still so many things I want to tell you, to share with you. 

Since I can’t mail you this letter, I’ll send it to a place where they keep women’s memories safe. Maybe someday, passing through this big city, you will stop and read it. Maybe you won’t. 

Good night, my love.”
― Leslie Feinberg

“I leaned my head back against the brick. “I think I’d be a gardener in a woods just for children, and when they came by I’d sit and listen to their wonderings. And the ocean would be nearby. I’d live in a little house on the shore. At dawn I’d strip off all my clothes and swim. At night I’d sing a song about the way life used to be. It would be such a sad song it would make the grownups nod and the children cry. But I’d sing it every night so that no one would ever confuse nostalgia with wanting to return.”
― Leslie Feinberg

“And she will be. Because it is an art—to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body