Eva > Eva's Quotes

“She could neither conform nor be happy in her unconformity. This she saw clearly now, and with cold anger at all the past futile effort. What a waste!”
― Nella Larsen, Quicksand

“On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“You forget all of it anyway. . . You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. . . You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it.
Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,
that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook
your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“There will be other lives.
There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands.
And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions.
And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles.
And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk.
And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything.
Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“Sorry but nothing of much importance ever happened to me...I'm just a girl who forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“...lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (although not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it”
― Nella Larsen

“Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked. Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“It's easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“Gym should be illegal. It's humiliating.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“I wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice if I just stopped talking.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“Do they choose to be so dense? Were they born that way? I have no friends. I have nothing. I say nothing. I am nothing. ”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones.
It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break -- these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak