Chloe > Chloe's Quotes

“But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.”
― Ian McEwan, The Children Act

“She resented the way she was listening out for him, her attention poised, holding its breath, for the creak of the door or a floorboard. Wanting it, dreading it.”
― Ian McEwan, The Children Act

“On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“There was once, and there was only once; once was all there was.”
― Ali Smith, There But For The

“Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.”
― Ali Smith, There but for the

“We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant.”
― bell hooks

“It leaves space for your thoughts to echo”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“so you protected yourself and loved small”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“She goes limp. The world pours in through her eyes and ears, her nose, her tongue, her skin. There's too much of it, and it never stops coming. She's like the drain in the corner of the shower room.”
― M. R. Carey

“There's nothing of humanity left in them, nothing to remind anyone that they were once alive. They're more like clothes that someone has taken off and left lying on the ground.”
― M. R. Carey

“I wasn't happy, exactly, but I was remembering how happiness felt.”
― karen joy fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Instead I watched our mother obsessively for signs of breakage.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were a slipperier things.”
― Karen Joy Fowler

“The best, most lasting changes are those which come about gradually; to reach great heights, a tree must first put down extensive roots.”
― Aprilynne Pike

“There's always someone who secretly believes in myths and legends; or at least parts of them. Those are the people who will look beyond the obvious and see things in this world that are truly wonderful.”
― Aprilynne Pike, Wings

“my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and taste and smell
and hearing and sight keep hitting and chipping with sharp fatal
tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of chrome and ex
-ecute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming
something a little different, in fact
myself
hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings”
― E. E. Cummings

“love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me