Abigail Nolan > Abigail's Quotes

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her...”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Do you know, Àntonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world. I'd have liked you to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister- anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and my dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of time when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“If you know someone's fear, you know them.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“Anyone, anything, can betray anyone. Even your own heart.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword

“To stand in front of a person who is your whole world and be told you are not enough. You are not the choice. You are a shadow to the person who is your sun.”
― Victoria Aveyard, King's Cage

“Sometimes his silence is better than anyone else’s words.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“Love can be exploited, I guess, used to manipulate. It's leverage. But I would never call loving someone else a weakness. I think living without love at all, any kind of love, is weakness. And the worst kind of darkness.”
― Victoria Aveyard, War Storm

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It's funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we're at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she’ll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings: hunger and thirst, a desire to speak Swedish, a physical desire to swim or dance.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Amor, ch'al cor gentile ratto s'apprende
prese costui de la bella persona
che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende.

Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona..."

"Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,
Seized him with my beautiful form
That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me.

Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,
took me so strongly with delight in him
That, as you see, it still abandons me not...”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“She was alone, and she liked it. It was the way she had learned everything important in her life.”
― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

“It is foolish to run risk of going mad for vanity's sake.”
― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

“How old were you when you started playing?”, she asked.
“Five. I was District Champion at seven. I hope to be a World Champion one day.”
“When?”
“In three years.”
“You'll be sixteen in three years”, she said, “If you win, what will you do afterward?”.
He looked confused. “I don't understand”, he replied.
“If you're a World Champion at sixteen, what will you do with the rest of your life?”
He still looked confused. “I don't understand”.”
― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

“I’ve grown to find peace and acceptance in not fighting what I can’t control.”
― Laura Taylor Namey, A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow

“So I wanted you to choose a future that’s first and foremost yours alone. Not to belong to me. I want you to belong with me.”
― Laura Taylor Namey, A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow

“I think the most impractical thing one can do is not follow your passions.”
― Kevin Kwan, Sex and Vanity