Bri > Bri's Quotes

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?

A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.”
― Colson Whitehead

“We learn from failure, not from success!”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Despair has its own calms.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Once upon a time, man had a love affair with fire.”
― Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“take it one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.”
― Robert McCammon, Swan Song

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.”
― Robert McCammon, Swan Song

“as she’d watched him stagger away Swan had realized that forgiveness crippled evil, drew the poison from it like lancing a boil.”
― Robert McCammon, Swan Song

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Then, Beowulf says wistfully, "Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Abuse is its own kind of reincarnation, isn’t it? We become the ones who made us.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“Suddenly I couldn’t think what people were for, couldn’t think what their lives amounted to besides misery. Like a bird, I looked down from high treetops at all the wretched villages of men and felt only blank confusion. Those pitiful beasts, I would think if I were a bird, those poor, sad creatures dragging themselves along the ground, passing their days laboring and fearing and suffering until death. Too clever to live in peace, too stupid to live well. They’re better off in the dirt, finally quiet, finally peaceful.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Nothing I like to do pays well.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“A home is never finished, it’s only saved from decay.”
― Victor LaValle, Lone Women

“Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Stephenie Meyer: Her vampires are sparkly, which I think we can all agree is wrong.”
― Christopher Moore