Elysephone > Elysephone's Quotes

“Through the boundless darkness, it seemed as if our long, gloomy carriage were the only existing world, monotonously rumbling along on its creaky wheels, my peculiar companion and I the only creatures alive.”
― Edogawa Rampo, Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination

“[…] When you get to this age, you realize that you’re not anyone special after all.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Family means nothing,” she said, and I knew she believed it. “You have no obligation to love your family. It wasn’t your choice to be born.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“Cassie's story made me acutely aware of the fact that in that moment, she inhabited a black body, and so marked, would never be gifted with escape.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“That while I wanted to write with the narrative bravado of Toni Morrison, it might be okay if I started with something less ambitious than a book like beloved.”
― Veronica Chambers, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“But as anyone who loves reading and writing quickly learns, both activities allow you to commune with the living and the dead, to listen to the thoughts of those who have come before you and argue, cajole, and sing praise for them in response.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“No matter the response though, I still and will always believe that representation of all kinds is essential. My work-the memoirs, anthologies, novels, television pilots, magazine articles-is just one long attempt to make sure that people from different backgrounds are seen and heard, especially people who are in some practical way challenging the status quo, and offering different interpretations of what it means to be a human being right now. What it means to be a feminist, for example, what it means to be a man in a culture that demands toxic masculinity. What it means to spend your days challenging the racism coded into artificial intelligence, to be pansexual and polyamorous, to be the third generation in your family to struggle with schizophrenia, to embark on the arduous search for your identity as a transracial adoptee. To have a family member in prison.”
― Rebecca Walker, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“The universe, the landscape, it is all changing. It has not changed enough-that is a given- but it is changing, and evolution is something to embrace. Racism is alive and well and we still encounter microaggressions on a regular basis, bat at least now we can go home and close the door and enjoy some entertainment, see ourselves on-screen, imagine ourselves as superheroes and goddesses. Before, you got hassled, you went home, and you had nothing. That's the difference”
― Lynn Nottage, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“Mom raised us more like cactuses, rather than orchids.”
― Gabourey Sidibe, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“I knew what it meant to feel very small in a large, hostile world.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“Everyone's different inside their head.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“You're literally me, but with all the trash cleared away.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“I sat in my little Brooklyn apartment and tried to listen: listen for the voice of my mother, listen for the singsong voices of my grandmothers, both passed away. Jamaica Kincaid taught me that the women I loved might not have been known to many people in the world but they were opera singers. They had beauty in their voices; great dramas were at the cruxes of their lives. And if I could catch those voices - the way they loved, the way they taught, the way they turned their faces away in pain, and how they stood in their own power-then their words on the page might become a song worth singing.”
― Veronica Chambers, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“I wanted to walk into the library on Fifth Avenue with the lions sitting outside and be able to look up my name in the card catalog. I wanted those walls to have just one book with my name on it.”
― Veronica Chambers, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are "allowed" to tell as people of colour.”
― Rebecca Walker, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“I teach poetry to teens, and I always include a picture of the poet on the handout. I want my readers to see Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni. I want them to know what Sandra Cisneros, Natalie Diaz, and Patricia Smith look like. Some will see their reflections looking back at them, others won't. Both are important. Who makes the work is just as important as the work made.”
― Renée Watson, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“It took me a while to unlearn the bad lessons my parents taught me about my existence by accident, as well as the bad lessons the media has been teaching me on purpose (that's another story entirely), but I'm glad I have learned.”
― Gabourey Sidibe, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“I knew so much about white characters, since I was taught, through the books I read, to empathize with them.”
― Nicole Dennis-Benn

“They both squealed in the face of hope and the audacity for a black body to exist despite the system designed to dismember it.”
― Mahogany L. Browne, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“I wish I could be as subtle and beautiful. All I know how to do is scream.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“Being clever was, after all, my primary source of self-esteem. I’m a very sad person, in all senses of the word, but at least I was going to get into university.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“Bedrooms are windows to the soul.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“I don’t think age has much to do with adulthood.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“I got four A grades [...] I expected to be happy about it. I expected to be jumping up and down and crying from joy.
But I didn't feel any of that. It just wasn't disappointment.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“I kept peeling off layers of my personality, but I seemed to be going in circles. Every time I thought I’d worked out what I really enjoyed, I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I just didn’t enjoy anything any more.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“What does total androgyny look like, when gender isn't even anything to do with appearance and voice?”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“He looked like he could rise from the ground and float amongst the clouds and become the new sun. He looked like he could kill someone with a smile. He looked like the best person in the world.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“The anger they harbored was so uncontrollable that only death could contain it.”
― Anchee Min, Empress Orchid