Mary > Mary's Quotes

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#1

“Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

1262 likes

#2

“You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love.”
― Richelle Mead, Frostbite

9761 likes

#3

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

3699 likes

#4

“When someone cries so hard that it hurts their throat, it is out of frustration or knowing that no matter what you can do or attempt to do can change the situation. When you feel like you need to cry, when you want to just get it out, relieve some of the pressure from the inside - that is true pain. Because no matter how hard you try or how bad you want to, you can't. That pain just stays in place. Then, if you are lucky, one small tear may escape from those eyes that water constantly. That one tear, that tiny, salty, droplet of moisture is a means of escape. Although it's just a small tear, it is the heaviest thing in the world. And it doesn't do a damn thing to fix anything.”
― Chase Brooks, Hello, My Love 2: First Love Deserves a Second Chance

tags: crying, fiction, pain, romance

2091 likes

#5

“Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.”
― Stephenie Meyer, New Moon

tags: fiction

1507 likes

#6

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

tags: fiction, loneliness, on-fiction

1381 likes

#7

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

tags: classic, drama, fiction, nick-carraway

1235 likes

#8

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

tags: fiction, money, on-writing, virgin, women, writing

1486 likes

#9

“No. No, I don't believe you'd betray me with her. I don't believe you'd cheat on me. But I'm afraid, and I'm sick in my heart that you might look at her, then at me. And regret.”
― J.D. Robb, Innocent in Death

tags: fiction, mystery, romance

1024 likes

#10

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

tags: fiction, humor

1156 likes

#11

“You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

tags: alien, apocalypse, cassie, choices, fiction, horror, paranormal, post-apocalyptic, science-fiction, survival, young-adult

767 likes

#12

“And it's hard to hate someone once you understand them.”
― Lucy Christopher, Stolen

tags: australia, fiction, gemma, hospital, kidnapping, stockholm-syndrome, ty

601 likes

#13

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster

tags: advice, e-m-forster, essay, fiction, writing

664 likes

#14

“And then there are the rare ones who know love, who understand it. Who freely give of themselves, demanding only a return of that love,that trust.”
― Kim Harrison, Every Which Way But Dead

tags: fiction, kisten, rachel-morgan, romance, supernatural, vampire

514 likes

#15

“A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.”
― Phyllis A. Whitney, Guide to Fiction Writing

tags: fiction, on-fiction, on-writing, writing

431 likes

#16

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

tags: fiction, invention, life, reality, strangeness, truth

438 likes

#17

“I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.”
― Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World

tags: children-s-literature, dahl, danny-the-champion-of-the-world, fiction

390 likes

#18

“Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

tags: fiction, storyteller

310 likes

#19

“In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

tags: fiction, historical, romance

526 likes

#20

“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

tags: fiction, inspiration, on-fiction, values

285 likes

#21

“Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

tags: adults, batman, children, comics, fiction, literature, reality, superheroes, superman

301 likes

#22

“Yeah, tell me I’m a bottle of single malt scotch, she thought. That’s the way to my heart.”
― L.J. Smith, Nightfall

tags: damon, elena, fiction, paranormal, romance, vampire

231 likes

#23

“I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.”
― Diane Setterfield

tags: books, fiction, reading

213 likes

#24

“That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.”
― Sara Raasch, Snow Like Ashes

tags: fiction, literary-criticism, literature, reading

197 likes

#25

“Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”
― Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

2136 likes

#26

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

tags: authors, books, literature, reading, writing

22054 likes

#27

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

tags: salinger, stories

6594 likes

#28

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

5089 likes