Ava > Ava's Quotes

“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“what must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world's pleasures?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“and it is always easier to believe what you already think than to try and change your mind.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“but if you act like you don't belong, if you act like you're apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“What she needs are stories.
Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“History is a thing designed in retrospect.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. But when you're the only one holding on to an idea, a memory, a girl, it's hard to keep it from floating away”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.
I don't know what I'm saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don't know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, juts-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, likes stones beneath a river”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind...”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“A young girl who wants to please by being interesting really only succeeds in pleasing herself.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“I didn’t know you could get buried in your own silence.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“It's never occurred to me that the stars are still up there shining even in the daytime when we can't see them.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a house you've been in before - you will recognize the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the books on the shelves, the contents of drawers: You could find your way around in the dark if you had to.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“The purpose of learning isn't to affirm our beliefs; it's to evolve our beliefs.”
― Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know