LONELY TOURIST > LONELY TOURIST's Quotes

“Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?

It must be that they believe in their night vision.
They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark.

But black wells only yield black water.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn’t answer the thing that asked her to let it out
(let you out from where?
let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks)
the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“They all tell you not to fight fire with fire,
but that is only because they are afraid of your flames.”
― Caitlyn Siehl, What We Buried

“What they don’t tell you about the illusion
is that I am as much lion as I am lion tamer.
And I got good at inflicting pain the same way I got good
at soothing it.
This, we call unfortunate,
but inevitable.”
― Ashe Vernon, Belly of the Beast

“Explanations are ghosts of guilt, shadows of sympathy, and I have no use for them.”
― Jessica Dawson, Fossil Fuels

“Hold everything very carefully unless it is your lover’s back. Then, become metal, become teeth, do not gentle yourself for any man. Do not change for the ones who think that
you should be softer, less mouth, less voice. You do not owe regrowth to anyone but yourself. When they begin to ask for you to shape yourself around them, leave. Shut the door firmly. Do not look back.”
― Azra Tabassum, Shaking the Trees

“Laws of silence don’t work…. When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by each other’s knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender, it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow. I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story. We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required period exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.”
― Libba Bray, Lair of Dreams

“The citizens rise and wash, shave and brush. They don stockings and dresses, pants, shirts, and suspenders. They button up their need. Affix their aspirations. Tuck histories neatly inside drawers, creating themselves as they go, a rhapsody of reinvention.”
― Libba Bray, Lair of Dreams

“People should think of their words like seeds. They should plant them, then let them grow in silence. Our old people taught us that the earth is always speaking to us, but that we have to be silent to hear her.”
― Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder

“We cling to the most painful reminders of our youth, our memories or our injuries, perhaps so we can look back to our former selves, console them, and say: Keep going. I know how the story ends.”
― Sarah Domet, The Guineveres

“She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal

“But how did you fight an enemy who never fought fair? Didn’t you have to break the rules to win against the Devil?”
― Libba Bray, Before the Devil Breaks You

“There was such fear in the world. But love was everywhere if you looked. It was the best thing about humans. That they could stare into the abyss and still open up their hearts. A spit in the eye to fear.”
― Libba Bray, Before the Devil Breaks You

“She looked almost bored, but he knew it was an act, because everything about Kate had always been an act— the bravado, the cold air, all the aspects of her father arranged into a shield, a mask.”
― Victoria Schwab, Our Dark Duet

“As she taped up her latest cuts, she wondered if, somewhere, there was a version of herself having fun. Feet up on the back of a theater seat while movie monsters slunk out of the shadows, and people in the audience screamed because it was fun to be afraid when you knew you were safe.”
― Victoria Schwab, Our Dark Duet

“What did you do in your songs?
I don’t know, I’ll never know, you say. Someone else will write them about me, won’t they?
I looked into a void of love. And I fell down. There was nothing else there. No where, where I was no one.
But I have to sing this song. I’m still here.”
― Alice Notley, In the Pines

“There isn’t any way to be.
I will meet you where you’ve gone. The cards are blank; the cards are empty there.
If I can just have one last cut.
Do you have a plan for the new?
The cards be blank. The symbols be over.
I will tell my fortune with the blank cards of blank.
What do you see?”
― Alice Notley, In the Pines

“And if you’re referring to your anguish, it’s just a thing. The shape of a trailor, a wheel, or a knife. Leave the details of your life and find another one.”
― Alice Notley, In the Pines

“The bottle is where everything sad or mean or confusing can go. And the blues--it's like that bottle. But in the bottle there's a seed that you let grow. Even in the bottle it can grow big and green. It's full of all those feelings that are in there, but beautiful and growing too.”
― Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

“But when a person fakes happy, it has edges. Regular people may not see, but the people who count, they can see edges and lines where your smile ends and the real you, the sadness (me) or the anger (Grandma), begins. T”
― Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

“We lie to ourselves in many ways; we write down only what we want to understand and what we want to see.”
― Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

“Mother Wolf, you called yourself. What does a wolf teach her pups but teeth and hunger? You didn't make me in your image. You made me into something worse. I have to know what that is.”
― Marjorie M. Liu, Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood

“A magical thought, inspired by the books he had read. But magic . . . surely there was a little magic in the world. The people who denied the existence of magic, they were the ones that it went badly for.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let The Right One In

“Because to watch would be to understand the play isn't being staged for us.”
― Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

“When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“The first words that are read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world, are when they look into The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.

The first question they ask is: 'Why was he eternally surprised?'

And they are told: 'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.'

The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Ankh-Morpork were: 'Rooms For Rent, Very Reasonable.' And he was glad of it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

“And that's how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“I’M NOT INTERESTED in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir