Julia > Julia's Quotes

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I renamed myself Ari.

If I switched the letter, my name was Air.

I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.

I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you're thinking but because you're feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can't always control the things you do when you're feeling too much.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“But I had learned to hide what I felt. No, that's not true. There was no learning involved. I had been born knowing how to hide what I felt.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.”
― Malcom X

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.”
― Louise O'Neill, Asking For It

“You see it in all animals - the female of the species is more deadly than the male.'

'Except humans.”
― Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

“Do you know they found land mines in woman's souls.”
― Andrea Gibson

“The devil is not as black as he is painted.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“With oppression, one group has the power to realize their choices and to name the world in order to change the world, while the other has these choices, these names, and this world imposed on them.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex