beth > beth's Quotes

“People don't change. They just get better at hiding who they really are.”
― Courtney Summers, Sadie

“Because you don't think I'm a bad person," he said. "And I don't want to prove you wrong.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“Serena hadn't told Sydney to go home. She hadn't told her to run away. She told her to go somewhere safe. And over the course of the last week, safe had ceased to be a place for Sydney, and had become a person.

Specifically, safe had become Victor.”
― V.E. Schwab, Vicious

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured, It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Marianne wanted her life to mean something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against the weak, and she remembered a time several years ago when she had felt so intelligent and young and powerful that she almost could have achieved such a thing, and now she knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could only help a few people. It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I inhaled books like other people breathe oxygen. I didn't just read for knowledge or pleasure, I read to live.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“Afterward I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I'm bettering myself, I thought. I'm going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx

“I want you to say everything, anything. I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“There are no perfect circles, Regan. Yes, there’s one, and it’s this one: They fall in love because they’re always in love. That’s circular, not a circle. He can believe whatever he wants; she knows it’s a perfect circle.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether