Rafaela > Rafaela's Quotes

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

“I didn't know the cost
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Anything I’ve ever tried to keep by force I’ve lost.”
― Marie Howe, What the Living Do

“Lively, lost, together,
I am always yours.”
― Ben Ditmars, Haiku in the Night

“Like a tree
I have stood my ground
Not fallen.”
― Ben Ditmars, Haiku in the Night

“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“when you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I lack nothing I need unless you count everything I want”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“History is painted by the winners.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love
silence and darkness.”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“things
that can't move
learn to see”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“What is better than believing you are heading towards love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“Besides, sometimes, to resolve desire, it's better to let the thing bloom. To feel this thing, to let it catch you unaware, to hold onto the ache. What is better than believing you are heading towards love?”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“To choose to love is to take a risk”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“A friend sends me a line from my novel: 'Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.' How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“All I could do was escape from reality, but every time I tried to escape from the pain, that same pain told me that I had probably been falling in love with him.”
― Hitomi Kanehara, Snakes And Earrings

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.”
― Natsume Soseki, Kokoro

“I'm so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness....Sometimes I'm so lonely I'm not even on that map.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn't keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Cadáver exquisito

“She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“The moral of this story is:

Beware the man who faces you unarmed.

If in his eyes you are not the target,

then you can be sure you are the weapon.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”
― Banana Yoshimoto