Ema > Ema's Quotes

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Muggle women wear them, Archie, not the men, they wear these,' said the Ministry wizard, and he brandished the pinstriped trousers.

'I'm not putting them on,' said old Archie in indignation. 'I like a healthy breeze 'round my privates, thanks.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“هل تعلم ذلك الشعور المحبط الذي يراودك عقب الانتهاء من قراءة رواية جيدة ؟ حين تصطدم بالواقع من جديد ، و تدرك أن مشاكلك مازالت كما هي ، و أن الأبطال لم يخرجوا من الرواية ليجعلوا من العالم مكانا أفضل...
لسبب كهذا أجد أن التعود علي الواقع مهما بدا مؤلما لكنه أفضل الحلول ، هكذا لن نشعر بالفارق بين الجنة و الجحيم ، ببساطة لأننا لم نر الجنة يوما...”
― حسني محمد الشحات

“I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain, period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“When anger rears up in me I have a trick I do where I picture it as a freshly uncoiled snake dropping down from the jungle canopy and heading for my neck. If I look at it directly it’ll disappear, but I have to do it while the snake’s still dropping or it will strike. This sounds like something they’d teach you in therapy at the hospital or something, but it’s not. It’s just a trick I found somewhere by myself. Once you’ve looked at a deadly thing and seen it disappear, what more is there to do? Walk on through the empty jungle toward the city past the clearing.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn't yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Every time her hand moves somewhere else, she whispers, “May I?” and the thrill of saying yes, yes, is like the pulsing of the tide over your face, and you would gladly drown that way, giving permission.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“No, Novikovs time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her |trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent. Maybe you mistook your future voice shouting through the walls for something else: a heartbeat pacing and then rapid with want, a purr.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“How many times have you said, 'If I looked a little different, I'd be drowning in love?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets