Ruby Abercromby > Ruby's Quotes

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
― Joan Didion

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“we are only what we always were”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“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

“Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person's hope. Leave it with me and I'll look after it for a while , if it feels too heavy for now.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves