Awwwtrouble > Awwwtrouble's Quotes

“Sea-fever

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.”
― John Masefield, Sea Fever: Selected Poems

“I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naive believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it.

And yet, And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we teach for?”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Better was largely irrelevant when it came to mothering because the entire enterprise relied on the presumption that one day, sooner than you thought, your child would become an entirely self-reliant, independent person who made her own decisions. That child wouldn't necessarily remember the Halloween costumes you made from hand six years running. Or maybe she did, but she resented you for it because she'd wanted store-bought costumes just like all her friends. It didn't matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child waled off in to the world alone.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“The greatest works of poetry are the stories we tell about ourselves.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“didn’t matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child walked off into the world alone.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Watching the sunrise.....what an act of beauty, of unwavering faith, something to look forward to each and every day.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“All the winged, even fungus gnats, know that you cannot fly if you're carrying too much weight with you. It's a well-known adage, actually: "The light of heart is free to fly.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“Where I come from we call what you’re feeling The Black Tide. It will pass. Tides, by their nature, come and go.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“I cannot recommend this to you enough: find something that you believe in, right down deep in the depths of your silvery plumage, and then throw your heart at it, blood and valves and veins and all. Because I did this, the world, though brambled and frothing at the mouth, looked more vibrant; blues were bluer, and even the fetid puddles that collected under rusting cars tasted as sweet as summer wine.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“And everyone on earth knows if you have the respect of a cat it means your soul is worth being around.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“Big Jim’s eyeball fell out. Like, fell the fuck out of his head. It rolled onto the grass, and to be honest, Big Jim and I were both taken aback.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“There would be no more hot dog-eating contests or NASCAR or picnics in the park or Cheetos or America's Funniest Home Videos or revving truck engines or books or children laughing or fetch with a stick or i{hone updates or shopping or electrical jobs or songs or genius inventions or drunken dancing or Fireball whiskey or snow globes or wedding vows or ugly ties or Christmas hugs or...families”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“Trees are normally very general and all-inclusive with their wisdom pearls. When a tree decides to talk to you, it's a very, very big deal, as if the world stops, as if you are scooped up and held in a snow globe, weightless and womb-like. I felt their vibrations in my feathers, in the flutter of my little black heart.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again

“And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again

“It was a truth universally acknowledged, Alys suddenly thought with a smile, that people enter our lives in order to recommend reads.”
― Soniah Kamal, Unmarriageable

“How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he's finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else's?”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Gehen, ging, gegangen

“Have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace - so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world - inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Gehen, ging, gegangen

“To understand what a person means or says, it’s basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

“Of course he's always know that the Odyssey and the Illiad are stories that were passed on orally long before Homer - or whoever it was - wrote them down. But never before has the connection between space, time, and words revealed itself so clearly as at this moment. The bad drop of the desert shows it off in sharp relief, but really it's always just the same all over the world: without memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet's surface.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

“The trick of the internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real... which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all.”
― Jennifer Weiner, Big Summer

“The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth as if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It's unfair because white people have a vested interest in undermining racism, it's amount, it's intensity, it's shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes. Wallace presses his tongue flat. “Good white people,” he says.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“His deficiencies are indeed what they are. There are gaps in his knowledge about developmental biology, which he has closed steadily over the past few years, through study and coursework. There was also, in those early years, a lack of technical expertise, which he has acquired through practice. But the deficiency to which Roman is alluding to is not one of those, mot one of the many ways in which people come into graduate school unprepared for its demands, wrong-fitted this way and that by it's odd rituals and rigors. Why Roman is referring to is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of requisite sameness. This deficiency cannot be overcome. The fact is, no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns or how many skills he masters, he will always be provisional in the eyes of these people, no matter how they might be fond of him or gentle with him.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but its instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.”
― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“Perhaps all families have these fleeting moments when, without ever saying as much, they take each other in and think, we work and we fit together and we love each other, and if we can remain like this, all will be fine.”
― David Nicholls, Sweet Sorrow

“the greatest lie that age tells about youth is that it’s somehow free of care, worry or fear. Good God, doesn’t anyone remember?”
― David Nicholls, Sweet Sorrow