Slanting Towards the Sea Quotes

“It wasn't until years later that I saw her words for what they really meant. If people want to love you, they do, no matter how flawed you are. But if they aren't inclined to love you, nothing you say or do, no amount of your own goodness, can make them change their mind.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“I had been hiding for so long I didn’t believe it possible that someone could see me. But someone had. And that felt even worse.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Turn the heat up and let the water boil. Let the whole thing blow up if it must, even if it takes me out with it.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Because even conceding to someone else’s wishes, giving in to meet someone else’s needs—even sacrificing yourself—is a choice.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“So much of seeing is in that willingness to look.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“HAVING TO ARRANGE A funeral is a ploy to take the mourners’ minds off their grief.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“It seems to me we’ve always been, and always will be, two islands bathing in the same sea with our backs to each other—him facing the sun, me facing the moon, both of us resenting the light the other got. But one of those lights has gone out already, and now the other one is fading too. I guess where it leaves us, then, is in the dark.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“I cried because I was only nineteen and I was already so tired of carrying around that jagged grain of loneliness on the inside that always threatened to cut me if I made a wrong turn. I cried because I had all this love inside me, and it had nowhere to go.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Do you have to make such a big deal out of everything? they said. Do you have to be so sensitive? But I couldn’t find a way to be something other than what I was. I could only hide it.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“But going back to my maiden name felt like trying to wriggle myself into my old high school jeans. It didn't fit anymore, and suddenly I was a stranger to all my identities.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Your hands are cold," he said as if this had surprised him, and then he leaned in to kiss me. And when he did, something inside me reoriented itself, my world sotly tipping into his direction, as if he himself were the sea.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“A story intended for one, viewed only by one.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“But that’s okay, I don’t really need air.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“When it was good, I would think, wait for it. When it was bad, I would also think, wait for it.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“was that I was afraid that if I did speak, she still wouldn’t listen.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“That it’s forever changing, but always stays the same. That it makes you feel alive like nothing else can. That’s what I love the most about this place.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“They gave me hope that one day I might find someone who’d shuck me like an oyster and find all the pearls I was hiding within, and this hope became my bread, my water, and my air.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“my world softly tipping into his direction, as if he himself were the sea.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Relief coursed through me, the first layer of nacre coating that grain of loneliness inside me, smoothing its barbed edges.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Feeling in constant pain is actually quite common, among highly intelligent people.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“If people want to love you, they do, no matter how flawed you are. But if they aren’t inclined to love you, nothing you say or do, no amount of your own goodness, can make them change their mind.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“The misery in his eyes imprints itself on me, and I can see what he’s saying, how the seed of insecurity planted in both our childhoods is exactly what got us here today. Making us both so starved to be seen while shying away from it at the same time, relegating ourselves to the shadows because we didn’t know how to claim the spotlight.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Heraclitus, you know? The only constant in life is change, and all that. Nothing is truly permanent.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Just a year before, in my senior year in high school, our Croatian teacher had tasked the class with writing an essay on the topic of Shakespeare’s quote “To thine own self be true.” The quote dug into the pain that had lain dormant throughout my teen years, that duality of life I had embraced—the armor offered up to the world, and the gentle essence it was meant to shield. How I’d learned to hide the soft parts of myself, like a crustacean.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“My world tipping ever so slightly in his direction, as it always does.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“But when all the other arguments fall silent, there is this: an amorphous feeling of doom for tethering myself even more tightly to a life I don’t want. A life where I have no say. A position in which I am the executor of someone else’s dreams.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“But when all the other arguments fall silent, there is this: an amorphous feeling of doom for tethering myself even more tightly to a life I don’t want. A life where I have no say.

A position in which I am the executor of someone else’s dreams.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Our home wasn’t any less broken just because we lived in one household.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“Why didn’t you go someplace else?”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea

“But where would I go? You’re my person.”
― Lidija Hilje, Slanting Towards the Sea