Jenna > Jenna's Quotes

“The darkness belongs to you. To shape as you will. To give it power or render it harmless.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Tower of Dawn

“Stop punishing yourself for being someone with a heart. You cannot protect yourself from suffering. To live is to grieve. You are not protecting yourself by shutting yourself off from the world. You are limiting yourself.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“You have risen from the ashes before. The only way to survive, " he said, "is to believe you always will.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Song Rising

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But I still don't know how to fix myself."
"There's nothing broken to be fixed," he said fiercely. " You are helping yourself. Healing the parts of you that hurt too much - and perhaps hurt others, too.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames

“I saw very little as it truly was. But that was what Martha taught me. We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl.

That's never their only story.

We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.

The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they're no longer there.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“That's the point of it, Bryce. Of life. To live, to love, knowing that it might all vanish tomorrow. It makes everything that much more precious.”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Earth and Blood

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Jesus, I am a sinner. I am vain. I am narcissistic. And my biggest sin was that I have been so afraid of You that I never really loved You until this moment. But I’m not afraid anymore because heaven and hell are not destinations. They are decisions.”
― Stephen Chbosky, Imaginary Friend

“Perhaps there could be no joy on this planet without an equal weight of pain to balance it out on some unknown scale.”
― Stephenie Meyer , The Host

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Without the dark there isn’t light. Without the pain there is no relief. And I remind myself that I’m lucky to be able to feel such great sorrow, and also such great happiness. I can grab on to each moment of joy and live in those moments because I have seen the bright contrast from dark to light and back again. I am privileged to be able to recognize that the sound of laughter is a blessing and a song, and to realize that the bright hours spent with my family and friends are extraordinary treasures to be saved, because those same moments are a medicine, a balm. Those moments are a promise that life is worth fighting for, and that promise is what pulls me through when depression distorts reality and tries to convince me otherwise.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“It’s about taking those moments when things are fine and making them amazing, because those moments are what make us who we are, and they’re the same moments we take into battle with us”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“We do not look back, Chaol. It helps no one and nothing to look back. We can only go on.”
There she was, that queen looking out at him, a hint of the ruler she was becoming. And it knocked the breath out of him, because it made him feel so strangely young—when she now seemed so old. “What if we go on,” he said, “only to more pain and despair? What if we go on, only to find a horrible end waiting for us?”
Aelin looked northward, as if she could see all the way to Terrasen. “Then it is not the end.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

“When the big things feel out of control

focus on what you love right under your nose”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“He sighed. “She told me that the people we lose never truly leave, but that only we get to define how they stay.”
― Roseanne A. Brown, A Song of Wraiths and Ruin

“Remember that we have something to fight for, and it will always triumph.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Kingdom of Ash

“What is the bravest thing you've ever said? asked the boy.
'Help,' said the horse.
'Asking for help isn't giving up,' said the horse. 'It's refusing to give up.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.”
― Lauren Oliver, Requiem

“You’re stronger than you believe. Don’t let your fear own you. Own yourself.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer

“You never called me back," he said. "I called you so many times and you never called me back."
Magnus looked at Alec as if he'd lost his mind. "Your city is under attack," he said. "The wards have been broken, and the streets are full of demons. And you want to know why I haven't called you?"
Alec set his jaw in a stubborn line. "I want to know why you haven't called me back."
Magnus threw his hands up in the air in a gesture of utter exasperation. Alec noted with interest that when he did it, a few sparks escaped from his fingertips, like fireflies escaping from a jar. "You're an idiot."
"Is that why you haven't called me? Because I'm an idiot?"
"No." Magnus strode toward him. "I didn't call you because I'm tired of you only wanting me around when you need something. I'm tired of watching you be in love with someone else - someone, incidentally, who will never love you back. Not the way I do."
"You love me?"
"You stupid Nephilim," Magnus said patiently. "Why else am I here? Why else would I have spent the past few weeks patching up all your moronic friends every time they got hurt? And getting you out of every ridiculous situation you found yourself in? Not to mention helping you win a battle against Valentine. And all completely free of charge!”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“C'est courageux d'aller dans l'inconnu': It is courageous to go into territory unknown.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“Part of me knows one more day won't do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“Question everything. Your love, your religion, your passion. If you don't have questions, you'll never find answers.”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“I'll say it one last time: Be brave.”
― Veronica Roth, Allegiant

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The funny thing about armor is that it doesn't just keep other people out. It keeps us in. We build it up around us, not realizing that we're trapping ourselves.”
― Victoria Schwab, The Unbound