sin > sin's Quotes

“Something I learned very quickly was that grieving was complicated by lack of certainty, that the hope inherent in a missing loved one was also a species of curse. People posted about children who had gone missing upwards of fifteen years ago and whose faces were now impossible to conjure, about friends who had messaged to confirm a meeting place and then simply never showed up. In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve. Deus ex machina – the missing loved one thrown back down to earth. Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person – but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that is what they call being consumed with remorse.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that's not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it's any use, but for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I will never be able to use it.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“It's strange, how little love you can survive on until you experience the warmth of people who choose you despite everything.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night

“Every generation before had a semblance of chance, but we have the end of the world. This end of the world. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, and I wish we could think of a future without a thousand ways of how we must change to endure it.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish [the book] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place

...

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves