Paula Melisa > Paula Melisa's Quotes

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Do you have a body if there is no one there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn't. I was just a mind floating around the rooms.”
― Jessie Burton, The Muse

“You really are an artist, aren’t you? You think it’s all about you, and you never stop looking for pain.”
― Jessie Burton, The Muse

“I was in a very free state in my life. This is something I struggle with as a mom because now that I have grown up, I couldn’t feel more passionate about being appropriate. Everything in my world is about being “appropriate.” People ask me, what are you going to tell your daughters about some parts of your life? I don’t want to have to lie, but I am much more invested in telling them how I found my values.”
― Drew Barrymore, Wildflower

“If you're reading this, then maybe you know you ought to read everything. And maybe you know you ought to read deeply. Because there's witchery in these words and spellwork in the spine.”
― Traci Chee, The Reader

“People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“Don't you think”—he smiled—“that my lack of faith makes such a trance pointless?” “No, I don't. And do you know why?” “No.” Nenneke leaned over and looked him in the eyes with a strange smile on her pale lips. “Because it would be the first proof I’ve ever heard of that a lack of faith has any kind of power at all.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“I wanted to know how humans came up with a view of the world that had so little magic in it. I needed to understand how they convinced themselves that magic wasn’t important.”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“This is why you have to stop keeping secrets, Matt. They’re going to destroy you from the inside.”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“Yes, I see that you are behaving like a prince but that doesn't mean you won't behave like a devil at the first opportunity.”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“I dreamed of my other family, the imaginary one with boring parents,”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I wish my shadow would get up and walk beside me.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“That's exactly it—I am crazy sad, and somewhere deep inside, all I want is to fly.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Whatever is different about you is what makes you amazing. Others will try to homogenize you for their own comfort level, because God forbid discomfort. Fuck that. Do not bend yourself to make others feel taller.”
― Rose McGowan, Brave

“I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”
― Frida Kahlo

“All my life, all I'd ever heard was: Emily's so shy, Emily's so quiet, Emily's so clever. Thinking back on it now, I don't know if I was ever any of those things, or if I just became shy and quiet and clever because everyone said I was.”
― Tanya Byrne, Heart-Shaped Bruise

“You'd think I'd be used to this sort of thing by now - navigating a room full of matched-up people, alone - but somehow it never really gets easier.”
― Christina Lauren, Dating You / Hating You

“I'm not an optimist, but I'm not exactly a pessimist, either. I'm a wait-and-see-when-you-have-more-info-ist.”
― Christina Lauren, Dating You / Hating You

“It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Books are Doors and I wanted out.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“They always end up alone in the stories—witches, I mean—living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and most men are cowards.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“I wanted wide-open horizons and worn shoes and strange constellations spinning above me like midnight riddles. I wanted danger and mystery and adventure.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“I liked the stillness of the room, too, and the way the smell of him lingered in the air like dust motes: sea salt and spices and strange stars.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“In my life I've learned that the people you love will leave you. They will abandon you, disappoint you, betray you, lock you away, and in the end you will be alone, again and always.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People