Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.”
― Dean Koontz

“those who cower forget how to stand and, in time, can only crawl”
― Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

“It will be people like us that save the world, she said: those who have walked the side of sorrow and seen the dawn.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.”
― Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island

“No, my death should take place in a blaze of excitement. I would live before I died.”
― Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

“He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.”
― Kristin Hannah, Night Road

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“There’s a word for this in Portuguese: saudade. It’s not exactly nostalgia, there’s more of a longing in it, for a feeling or way of life that may be impossible to recapture—that may or may not have even existed in the first place. “An indolent dreaming wistfulness” is how I’ve seen one writer describe it. Now that’s a great word.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Parents are defined by their mistakes.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Not all the time, but I’ve learned that you don’t have to be happy all the time. But I’m happy… enough.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“But all great adventures eventually conclude, and for too many years I’ve been focusing on the ending, not the journey.”
― Alli Frank, Never Meant to Meet You

“But accepting that something is true isn’t the same as thinking that it is just.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“There are languages without words and violence is one of them.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“while we may be born into families, it doesn’t necessarily mean we belong to them.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Besides, even if he knew every word in the English language, he still wouldn’t have any idea what to say. Because what does one say to someone who’s lost everything?”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.”
― Voltaire

“Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“There’s this toxic belief that family should stick together simply because they’re family.”
― Colleen Hoover, It Starts with Us

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Seeing Bobby with his mother, the way he needed her, pulled on her arms and legs for her undivided attention—was it possible both to miss something and to feel relief at its being gone at the same time?”
― Deepa Varadarajan, Late Bloomers

“what did she think was going to happen if she got drunk and went into his room with him?” It starts with “she wanted it” and ends with “she deserved it.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown