Isabella > Isabella's Quotes

“Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“People change and forget to tell each other.”
― Lillian Hellman

“We are our own dragons and our own heroes. We must rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
― Peter S. Beagle

“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

“È raro che un uomo sia preso per quello che è veramente – disse. – Nel mondo spesso si commettono sbagli di valutazione. Ora, io ti ho riconosciuto come unicorno già quando ti ho visto la prima volta, e so di essere tuo amico. Invece tu mi hai preso per un buffone, o uno stupido, o un traditore, e questo devo essere se mi vedi così. La magia su di te è solo magia e svanirà appena sarai libera, ma l'incantesimo dell'errata opinione che tu poni su di me dovrò portarlo addosso per sempre ai tuoi occhi. Non sempre siamo quello che sembriamo, e quasi mai ciò che sogniamo.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Il ricordo di un trauma è sfocato per definizione. L’ago salta sul vinile, le prime tre battute della canzone sono perdute. Puoi solo riempirle a orecchio.
Anche con i metodi più comuni per riportare in superficie le cose più nascoste, come la tecnica EMDR che ha preso il posto dell’ipnosi, non ti consegnano mai il passato sotto forma di immagini in movimento. Il trauma è un livido, una parte del tuo cervello annerita per sempre, e per questo tu non vai a stuzzicarlo con un dito. Qualcosa ti dice: lascia stare.
E se poi tu decidi di provarci? Di non lasciare stare?
Non le rivedi, certe cose.
Non è come guardare una Polaroid. Tu le rivivi.”
― Violetta Bellocchio, Il corpo non dimentica

“Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways - you have not imagined the lives of others.”
― Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

“Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger,
And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.

When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. "You don't talk like that," he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. "Don't you know how to behave, woman? You don't curtsy, either."

But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down.

"I am here now," she said at last.

Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come. Why did you come now?" The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.

The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world."

"She would be." Molly sniffed. "It would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue." She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn's cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, "It's all right. I forgive you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“He repeated the story he liked to tell us. The one with the small boy who was trying to lift a rock in his garden, and the boy’s dad was watching him heave and sweat and struggle, but get nowhere. Eventually the dad asks, ‘Why don’t you use all of your strength?’ And the boy says, ‘I am, Daddy. I am using all of my strength.’ And his dad says, ‘No you’re not. You haven’t asked me for help.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?

"I don't know," Connor shrugged, exhausted. "Your stories never made any sense to me."

The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“You were merely wishing for the end of pain, the monster said. Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“After he killed the farmer's daughter, said the monster, the prince lay down next to her and returned to sleep. When he awoke, he acted out a pantomime should anyone be watching. But also, it may surprise you to learn, for himself. The monster's branches creaked. Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“You be as angry as you need to be," she said. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard."

He couldn't look at her. He just couldn't.

"And if, one day," she said, really crying now, "you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to know that it was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud. All right?"

He still couldn't look at her. He couldn't raise his head, it felt so heavy. He was bent in two, like he was being torn right down through his middle.

But he nodded.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love... or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not known it, habit being a great binder. I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.
... I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams... To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you.
The truth is, you never understood yourself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion