Antonia > Antonia's Quotes

“People say time is a great healer. They're wrong. Time is simply a great eraser. It rolls on and on regardless, eroding our memories, chipping away at those great big boulders of misery until there's nothing left but sharp little fragments, still painful but small enough to bear.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Hiding Place

“We romanticize the past with our period dramas and glossy film adaptations. A bit like we do with nature. Nature is violent, unpredictable and unforgiving. Eat or be eaten. That's nature. However much Attenborough or Coldplay you wrap it up in.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Hiding Place

“And after all, kids will be kids. The problem is, if you let kids be kids, then before you know it they're smearing their faces in pigs' blood, pushing each other off the edge of cliffs and smashing their mates' heads in with rocks. Our job as teachers, adults and parents is to stop, at every level, kids being kids, or they'll tear the fucking world down around our ears.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Hiding Place

“People really are like house with vast rooms and tiny windows. And maybe it's a good thing, the way we never stop surprising each other.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“He talked about the ocean between people. And how the whole point of everything is to find a shore worth swimming to.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“But I'm tired of coming out. All I ever do is come out. I try not to change, but I keep changing, in all these tiny ways. I get a girlfriend. I have a beer. And every freaking time, I have to reintroduce myself to the universe all over again.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“The closest thing I’ve ever had to a journal is probably you.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“Nothing is worse than the secret humiliation of being insulted by proxy.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

“Time is priceless, but it’s Free. You can't own it, you can use it. You can spend it. But you can't keep it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It's just that I don't want to be somebody's crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“You have such energy. You're like the sun. When you're interested in someone, you turn your rays towards them and they luxuriate in your warmth. But then you turn somewhere else, leaving them in the shadow, and they spend all their energy trying to recreate the memory of your light.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“When we first come here in 1973, two men came to restaurant and say, ‘Go back to China and take your filthy, foreign food with you.’ I say, ‘You are angry. Anger comes from stomach. Sit. I bring you soup. For free. It will make you feel better.’ They ate my wonton soup. Recipe from my grandmother. They have been customers of restaurant for forty years. Meet force with softness. Recipe for life. Now you understand.” And, strangely, he did.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“I took all the blame. I admitted mistakes I hadn't made, intentions I'd never had. Whenever she turned cold and hard, I begged her to be good to me again, to forgive me and love me. Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Smrknem se i zagledam starome u oči. U njima vidim golemu prazninu, kao da je nakon pustih godina konačno shvatio gdje je problem. Kao da mu je sinulo kako naš odnos nije takav zato što sam ja to izabrao, već on. Kao da je shvatio kako nije na djetetu da uspostavlja odnos s roditeljem, već je suprotno.”
― Zoran Žmirić, Hotel Wartburg

“Mi sebi rado postavljamo metafizička pitanja o svijetu, životu i čovjeku. A trebali bismo iznova i stalno pitati: zašto s tolikim naporom i mukom živimo, kad znamo da ćemo ovdje biti samo jednom i kad imamo tako kratko i neponovljivo vrijeme u ovom neopisivo lijepom svijetu?”
― Semezdin Mehmedinović, Me’med, crvena bandana i pahuljica

“When we met, we were serious and old beyond our years, but then we began to grow backward and now we are two weary, frightened children.”
― Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart

“I want to believe that her memory will soon come back, because we don’t have the strength to fight against forgetting.”
― Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart

“Where does our need to accelerate time come from? From impatience to arrive in the near future into which we have projected our trifling desires. Our need to slow time down would surely be natural. But why this strong desire to speed things up? Why are we always in a hurry to reach the future?”
― Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart

“I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.
The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.
In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“But I would like to make an important point before this
goes any further and that is if anyone feels like arresting me
for corrupting an innocent kid then all I can say is that
Edmond was not corruptible. Some people are just like
that and if you don't believe me it just means you've never
met one of them yourself.
Which is your loss.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“The two of us weren’t made for this world, because there’s nothing in it we want to possess.”
― Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart

“The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now