hel > hel's Quotes

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves,”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.
The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Nobody loves you like your mother and father. Not your husband, and not your children. While your parents are alive, eat as much of their love as you can, so it can sustain you for the rest of your life.”
― E.J. Koh, The Magical Language of Others

“Ever since those days this has been the attitude with which I have always confronted life: from things too much waited for, too much embellished with anticipatory daydreams, there is in the end nothing I can do but run away.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected he was whittling at my skull — no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels.”
― Paul Harding

“Everything that loomed so large close up - all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing. You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“That's why we make enemies of our friends as soon as they start to drift, he thought, cos that way they get stuck with all our flaws, unlike when they're shared. Maybe brief friendships are best. If you pull out in time, the vices are all theirs.”
― Yuri Herrera, The Transmigration of Bodies

“It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“A love that can be found within everything. And as this world turns and changes, the bits and scraps of my love that find their homes around me... There. See? One piece has just found its place in you. Just like that.”
― Fumiyo Kouno, In This Corner of the World

“Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. this was the sum of everything I'd been in my life--and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name.”
― André Aciman

“Some stories are your flowers. Others are your meat and bread. This story was neither flowers nor meat nor bread. It was extra, and it was impossible. It was their shared cursed inheritance.”
― Nomi Eve, The Family Orchard

“Most of us mortals never get to know our real destiny; we're just trampled by it. By the time we raise our heads and see it moving off down the road, it's already too late, and we have to walk the rest of the way along the straight and narrow ditch that dreamers call maturity.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“This is my problem. I want other people to tell me how they feel. But I'm not so sure I want to return the favor.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it. That’s how I look at it. Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“It's not like I'm some evil witch, an Uregma of the unborn, but I've learned to look at life from above, like an Aeroflot pilot flying over our capital. My mother would say like an eagle over the steppe swarming with mice. Like a girl at her embroidered sleeves, as people in the country say. It's the only way to tell right from wrong. I'm not the most sensitive woman, but my heart isn't made of stone either. I only know things are right or wrong, regardless of a woman's tears.”
― Petra Hůlová, All This Belongs to Me

“Black tea is steeped in imperialism. That's what gives it its flavor. Anything this flavorful has to be hiding an incredible amount of carnage.”
― Un-su Kim, The Plotters

“What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“I made a joke, I said, "What are you up to? You want us to jump?"
And Nicky said, "Could be fun."
I... Let me put it this way: When you find yourself high on the roof of a hotel with a husband who doesn't outright say that the two of you shouldn't jump off, you start to realize you have a lot of problems. This wasn't my rock bottom. But it was the first time I looked around and thought, Oh, wow, I'm falling.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea’s consoling silence.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“There’s Ambien-in-alcohol weird and then there’s Ambien-mistaken-for-cocaine weird.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia

“But even I could not fill each minute with fear. I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—in such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom. The days passed, and he lived. Two months passed, and I could go a whole day without looking over the precipice of his death.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“She was antimatter, with added self-pity.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn't keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Cadáver exquisito

“You haven't woken yourself up, though, merely passed through into another layer. You feel the weight of an enormous glacier bearing down on your body. You wish that you were able to flow beneath it, to become fluid, whether seawater, oil, or lava, and shuck off these rigid, impermeable outlines, which encase you like a coffin. Only that way might you find some form of release.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work. I am absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do. Even if it turns out that I don’t have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there’s nothing I can do about this feeling. I can’t make it go away.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs: A powerful and intimate novel about what it means to be a woman in modern Japan

“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“She alone would do a mad and wonderful thing like that, ringing me up. No one else ever did things like that for me. I always had had to do the ringing up and the asking, and going to people’s rooms, always I was the one to ask for love.”
― Han Suyin, Winter Love