M > M's Quotes

“A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“Lonely, ain't it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don't want to hold it together.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.”
― Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

“I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves.”
― Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening

“Even though it will feel uncomfortable for a while, but according to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.”
― Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening

“Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?”
― Vigdis Hjorth, Long Live the Post Horn!

“Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Libraries, archives, and museums all find themselves at the intersection of materiality and the mystical. Perhaps this is why we’re so quiet when we enter them.”
― Jenn Shapland

“Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin.”
― Alexander Chee, Edinburgh

“The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with “mother” as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”
― Doris Lessing

“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.

But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
― Raymond Carver

“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”
― Raymond Carver

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
― Alice Walker

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”
― alice walker, The Color Purple

“Someone once asked, "If you could take it all back, would you?"
At the time I didn't know. Now I do. I wouldn't take that terrible experience back for anything in the world. Too much light has come out of my darkness.”
― Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

“Something just like it happened to me once, something like what you're describing. Love. That's what it is.”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“He says he can’t understand these people. “People who sail through life like the world owes them a living.”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love