Raechel > Raechel's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Oh, but you must travel through those woods again and again... said a shadow at the window... and you must be lucky to avoid the wolf every time...

But the wolf... the wolf only needs enough luck to find you once.”
― Emily Carroll, Through the Woods

“Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced. We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender, race, class, faith, social involvement, and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the matter of symbolism.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

“The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“The waltz held the feeling you get when you finish a well-loved book. It left me longing for something I couldn't name.”
― Louise Miller, The City Baker's Guide to Country Living

“Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.”
― R.L. Stine

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“One must learn to love oneself- thus do I teach- with a wholesome and healthy love: that one may endure to be with oneself, and not go roving about.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“evidently what he was subsisting on was rage and recrimination. When interviewed on whether that was a sustainable traditional diet, a Shoshone elder looked into the camera and shrugged, said it had kept him going for eighty-eight years so far, hadn’t it?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Attack of the 50 Foot Indian

“I encourage people to remember that "no" is a complete sentence.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“You have my permission not to love me;
I am a cathedral of deadbolts
and I’d rather burn myself down
than change the locks.”
― Rachel McKibbens

“Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn’t matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

“...for one thing you learns when you is a girl is that most women's hearts is full of secrets.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

“I had thoroughly been a girl so long by then that I'd grown to like it, got used to it, got used to not having to lift things, and have folks make excuses for me on account of me not being strong enough, or fast enough, or powerful enough like a boy, on account of my size. But that's the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can't be that thing. You just playing it. You're not real.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

“How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These