grace ! > grace !'s Quotes

“Anoshe was a word for strangers in the street, and lovers between meetings, for parents and children, friends and family. It softened the blow of leaving. Eased the strain of parting. A careful nod to the certainty of today, the mystery of tomorrow. When a friend left, with little chance of seeing home, they said anoshe. When a loved one was dying, they said anoshe. When corpses were burned, bodies given back to the earth and souls to the stream, those left grieving said anoshe.

Anoshe brought solace. And hope. And the strength to let go.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“In myths, the hero survives.
The evil is vanquished.
The world is set right.
Sometimes there are celebrations, and sometimes there are funerals.
The dead are buried. The living move on.
Nothing changes.
Everything changes.
This is a myth.
This is not a myth.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“On vis och," he told himself.

Dawn to dusk. A phrase that meant two things in his native tongue.

A fresh start. A good end.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“She smiled then, her eyes red, her cheeks scattered with some kind of dust. It was a smile he thought he might die to earn again.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“We meet fear. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“This action will have no echo.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“None of us move on without a backward look. We move on always carrying with us those we have lost.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Inej almost felt sorry for her. Dunyasha really believed she was the Lantsov heir, and maybe she was. But wasn’t that what every girl dreamed? That she’d wake and find herself a princess? Or blessed with magical powers and a grand destiny? Maybe there were people who lived those lives. Maybe this girl was one of them. But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Nina is everything you say. It’s too much.”
“Mmm,” Inej murmured, taking a sip from her mug. “Maybe you’re just not enough.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Do you think it will always be this way?”
“What?”
“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”
I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don't know,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“You can love someone down to their core and they can love you right back just as hard, and if you traded diaries you’d learn things you never suspected. There’s a part of everyone deep down inside of them not meant for you. And the sooner you learn that, the easier your life is gonna be.”
― Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

“A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“The most important thing I learned [...] was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
― Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
― Kait Rokowski

“I am not dying," said Rumfoord. "I am merely taking my leave of the solar system. And I am not even doing that. In the grand, in the timeless, in the chronosynclastic infundibulated way of looking at things. I shall always be here. I shall always be wherever I've been.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“Maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people," I say. "Maybe we're accumulating these new selves all the time.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“As long as there have been women," Mom told me, "there have been ways to punish them for being women.”
― Elana K. Arnold, What Girls Are Made Of

“The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can't get away from it. Not ever.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“I think maybe we die every day. Maybe we're born new each dawn, a little changed, a little further on our own road. When enough days stand between you and the person you were, you're strangers. Maybe that's what growing up is. Maybe I have grown up.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“Hell? Hell is a fairy tale for the gullible, for what punishment could be worse than that we inflict upon ourselves? We burn so badly in this life that there can be nothing left.”
― Erika Johansen, The Fate of the Tearling

“The future was only disasters of the past, waiting to happen anew.”
― Erika Johansen , The Queen of the Tearling

“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“I know you can't live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. So you, and you and you: you got to give them hope; you got to give them hope.”
― Harvey Milk

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets