Haley Allen > Haley's Quotes

“In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones. — Sufi proverb”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“How come the past tense is always longer?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I’ve
plagiarized my life
to give you the best
of me”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love. ”
― Allen Ginsberg

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― 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

“To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.”
― Eskimo Proverb

“Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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

“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“A time like that comes for every man, when he chooses what sort of man he wants to be. And if you don't know the story, you don't know the man.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire