jae > jae's Quotes

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, your course, is "silence." But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember. —Sarah Manguso”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Because watching him love Tiger Lily was better than not watching him at all.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“To love someone was not what she had expected. It was like falling from somewhere high up and breaking in half, and only one person having the secret to the puzzle of putting her back together.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“I began to see that Wendy had something Tiger Lily hadn't even known she was supposed to have. Of all the things Tiger Lily had thought she might have to be for Peter-strong, brave; to be big and to keep up-she had never thought that the one thing he wanted most from her was simply to show that she believed in him, always and without fail.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“There was no twinkle in his eyes.
"Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough."
Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn't understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn't work that way.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“Did you know I always thought you were braver than me? Did you ever guess that that was why I was so afraid? It wasn’t that I only loved some of you. But I wondered if you could ever love more than some of me. I knew I’d miss you. But the surprising thing is, you never leave me. I never forget a thing. Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn’t seem broken at all.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“She said she thought there were different ways of loving someone, and there were some she used to think were the most important, and now she had changed her mind.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“If you have reasons for not coming back, I don’t want to know them. I just want you to come back anyway. Ignorance, see?”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night's fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of depts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I know you loved us all, in your own way. Magdalena for her brilliance, Alexi for his loveliness. But I was your war bride, your faithful Constanta, and you loved me for my will to survive. You coaxed that tenacity out of me and broke it down in your hands, leaving me on your work table like a desiccated doll until you were ready to repair me. You filled me with your loving guidance, stitched up my seams with thread in your favorite color, taught me how to walk and talk and smile in whatever way pleased you best. I was so happy to be your marionette, at first. So happy to be chosen.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I never penetrated to the burning heart of you, only came away with empty, scorched fingers.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I am trying to tell you why I did what I did. It is the only way I can think to survive and I hope, even now, that you would be proud of my determination to persist. God. Proud. Am I sick to still think on you softly, even after all the blood and broken promises?”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I saw every soft moment we had shared flicker over your face, and you were so beautiful. Desperate, vulnerable. Fear for your life made you look like a man who could really love and be loved, like you might hand over your heart and all its secrets without my having to crack your ribs open to get to them.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“Nina understood, maybe for the first time, that letting people love you and care for you is part of how you love and care for them.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Must be nice. To be able to be weak. I wouldn’t know.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“It was as if June had given her a box—as if every parent gives their children a box—full of the things they carried. June had given her children this box packed to the brim with her own experiences, her own treasures and heartbreaks. Her own guilts and pleasures, triumphs and losses, values and biases, duties and sorrows. And Nina had been carrying around this box her whole life, feeling the full weight of it. But it was not, Nina saw just then, her job to carry the full box. Her job was to sort through the box. To decide what to keep, and to put the rest down. She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Too much self-sufficiency was sort of mean to the people who loved you, Kit thought. You robbed them of how good it feels to give, of their sense of value.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“There’s no room for you in my life anymore. And I don’t owe it to you to make any space.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Our parents live inside us, whether they stick around or not... They express themselves through us in the way we hold a pen or shrug our shoulders, in the way we raise our eyebrow. Our heritage lingers in our blood.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“But they were in love, the kind of love that hurts. They hit highs so high neither of them could quite stand it, and lows so low they weren't sure they'd survive them.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“I think the problem, Dad," she said, with an unexpected warmth in her voice, "is that your love doesn’t mean very much.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Why are you so beautiful, do you think? So hungry? So able to bend the wills of those around you? You are like the death flowers that grow rampant in your wake: lovely to look at, intoxicating even, but get too close and you will soon learn that there is something rank beneath. That’s what beauty often is, in nature. A warning. A disguise.”
― Krystal Sutherland, House of Hollow

“Levana's heart throbbed. "It's been almost ten years."

"I know."

"And now? Are you still waiting for it to be over?"

His expression softened. The anger was gone, replaced with something infuriatingly kind, though his words were heartbreakingly cruel. "Are you still waiting for me to fall in love with you?”
― Marissa Meyer, Fairest