Alexandra > Alexandra's Quotes

“This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,

"You owe me."

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.”
― Hafiz

“I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.”
― Joseph McElroy, Lookout Cartridge

“And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“...much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success--on tactical errors and pipe dreams.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.”
― Amy Tan, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“What the war did to dreamers.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”
― Tove Jansson

“Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”
― Elizabeth McCracken

“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination