Gemma > Gemma's Quotes

“With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst - be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark - you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment?”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Memories are like the heart; you mustn’t ask too much of them. Just let them get on quietly with their schooling.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
― Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

“The key to understanding every story is to find yourself in it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“We need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“They did this to me. They did that to me. A woman who thinks that way will never overcome her anger. You are not being punished for your anger. You're being punished by your anger.”
― Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women

“How do we fall in love? ... How different it is with friendship. No one picks a friend for us. We come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son. We tie ourselves together through moment. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else ever will.”
― Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women

“Fall down eight times, stand up nine. For me, this saying is less about the dead paving the way for future generations than it is for the women of Jeju. We suffer and suffer and suffer, but we also keep getting up. We keep living. You would not be here if you weren't brave. Now you need to be braver still.”
― Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women

“Sadness, essentially, is the ghost of happiness.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Music makes you feel younger, more confident you can take on the world and the obstacles it throws at you.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It's only when I'm sad that I feel truly wise.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Beauty is a private moment in the mind, which we then seek to communicate.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Most of us carry around the extravagant hope that the world can at least catch a glimpse of what we consider to be our true face. We can't help harbouring the desire that past achievements and former incarnations still reveal some glimpse of themselves on our person. That people might be able to read the history of a face and not just its live bulletins.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Music can be the medium of sharing experience in a purified and heightened form; but it can also make being alone a stirring and highly privileged place to be.”
― Glenn Haybittle, Scorched Earth

“Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.”
― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“It's like men and women sing different words to the same song.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“She quickly learned that the sight of Venice at given moments can root you in your deepest longings. It can also make you realise your identity too is built on shifting water, consists of rising and falling tides, countless ephemeral reflections and refractions. Venice can wash through you the love you have never made, the battles you have never fought, the beauty you have never created. It can flood to the surface everything you have lost and everything you have never known. It can reveal you to yourself without your carnival masks.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“There are one or two places in the world that know our secrets.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“Memory is both the best and cruellest friend we will ever have.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“Life cannot be experienced deeply without kindness, just as life cannot be experienced deeply without art.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love