Ethan > Ethan's Quotes

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

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“History has failed us, but no matter.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“My greatest wish for humanity is not for peace or comfort or joy. It is that we all still die a little inside every time we witness the death of another. For only the pain of empathy will keep us human. There’s no version of God that can help us if we ever lose that.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“Contrary to popular belief, charisma was not inherent but had constantly to be reinforced.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies