mona > mona's Quotes

“Growing up and seeing your parents' flaws is like losing your religion. I don't believe in God anymore. I don't believe in my father either.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“Do you think it's funny that both of our favourite memories are about the people we like the least now?" I ask.

"Maybe that's why we dislike them," she says. "The distance between who they were and who they are is so wide, we have no hope of getting them back.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“I think all the good parts of us are connected on some level. The part that shares the last double chocolate chip cookie or donates to charity or gives a dollar to a street musician or becomes a candy striper or cries at Apple commercials or says I love you or I forgive you. I think that's God. God is the connection of the very best parts of us.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“We think we want all the time in the world with the people we love, but maybe what we need is the opposite. Just a finite amount of time, so we still think the other person is interesting. Maybe we don't need acts two and three. Maybe love is best in act one.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“I really don't know. I guess I'm more interested in why people feel like they have to believe in God. Why can't it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we're born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn't matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“I is the hardest word to define.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“And if you can't pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren't really real, you know? Maybe I'm just a lie that I'm whispering to myself.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Seeing your past - or a person from your - can for me at least be physically painful. I'm overwhelmed by a melancholic ache - and I want the past back, not matter the cost. It doesn't matter that it won't come back; that it never even actually existed as I remember it - I want it back. I want things to be like they were, or like I remember them having been: Whole. But she doesn't remind me of the past, for some reason, she feels present tense”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it's the only one you're able to have, the thought you're perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It's always the fear of looking stupid that stops you from being awesome.”
― Kiera Cass, The Selection

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I've been screaming for years and no one has ever heard me.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I am nothing but novocaine. I am numb, a world of nothing, all feeling and emotion gone forever.
I am a whisper that never was.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“Someone picked up the sun and pinned it to the sky again, but every day it hangs a little lower than the day before. It's like a negligent parent who only knows one half of who you are. It never sees how its absence changes people. How different we are in the dark.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“My life is four walls of missed opportunities poured in concrete molds.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“Find me a cure for these tears, I'd really like to exhale for the first time in my life.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“My greatest wish for humanity is not for peace or comfort or joy. It is that we all still die a little inside every time we witness the death of another. For only the pain of empathy will keep us human. There’s no version of God that can help us if we ever lose that.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“Without the threat of suffering, we can’t experience true joy.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“I wonder what life will be like a millennium from now, when the average age will be nearer to one thousand. Will we all be renaissance children, skilled at every art and science, because we’ve had time to master them? Or will boredom and slavish routine plague us even more than it does today, giving us less of a reason to live limitless lives? I dream of the former, but I suspect the latter.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“Death makes the whole world kin.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“I think about religion and how, once we because our own saviors, our own gods, most faiths became irrelevant. What must it have been like to believe in something greater than oneself? To accept imperfection and look to a rising vision of all we could never be? It must have been comforting. It must have lifted people from the mundane, but also justified all sorts of evil. I often wonder if the bright benefit of belief outweighed the darkness its abuse could bring.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“The past never changes—and from what I can see, neither does the future.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close