Gabi > Gabi's Quotes

“I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them.”
― Uma Thurman

“With my wolf's hunger
I haul my lamb's body
down like a sail

I am like
the wretched boat
and the lascivious sea”
― Giuseppe Ungaretti, Selected Poems

“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

“Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“There are things you want to say but don't
There are things I want to say but I already said them
A year ago or two or five, when we first met
There were times I thought you knew I loved you
You never knew
We never were
I died
You died
That's it”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“To get rejected so vehemently
Over and over again
Until some said it was the rejection I was after
No it wasn't
I wanted the intensity that you sometimes promised”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“And forgot about me
You forgot about me

And what I meant to you
And then it was over”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“Not sure what of this you did offer me
Never did amount to anything
So with this
I go”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“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

“199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”
― Anais Nin

“Psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable, that if that I was feeling wasn't love then I am forced to admit that I don't know what love is, or, more simply, that I loved a bad man.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“if people are denied certain parts of relationships they need as children, they hunt for these parts as adults.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. ”
― Roland Barthes

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Our favorite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“Sometimes pain is the call of a wound that needs tending, and sometimes it is the sting of its healing.”
― Melissa Febos, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“We find ways to comfort one another and to comfort ourselves. And comfort eases, but it does not erase. Until then, we keep reading.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“There is a moment in your 20s when you know what it means to love rightly, but not how to do it, and then you begin to learn.”
― Melissa Febos

“I used to think that happiness, like God, was an idea weaker people were sold on, to manage the grief of a world with so much suffering. It is just easier, I thought, to decide that you are doing something wrong and you just need to buy the right thing, read the right book, find the right guru, or pray more to be happy than to accept that life is a great long heartbreak. Happiness is not what I imagined that mirage to be: an unending ecstasy or state of perpetual excitement. Not a high or a mirage, it is just being okay. My happiness is the absence of fear that there won't be enough -- enough money, enough power, enough security, enough of a cushion of these things to protect me from the everyday heartbreaks of being human. Heartbreak doesn't kill you. It changes you.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets