Jen > Jen's Quotes

“The comma is a heart murmur”
― Jake Skeets, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

“Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you're not the one that'll be alive to see it.”
― Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”
― Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

“In New York, you can talk to anyone about anything at any time and have a conversation so long you'll fall a little in love with that person, and then never see them again.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“For my mother, who taught me how to hold on to a dream”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“We are all migrants through time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“A second chance doesn't mean you're in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“When other people are happy, I don't have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I wake up. It is so silent. I could fall through the cracks of such silence.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“I emptied myself, lost myself in the work. I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Love is never any better than the lover.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had at the moment.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated—hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice? One takes away a million lives, the other saves a hundred times as many.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“So many of our leaders are weak, and choose to take power from others rather than build strength in themselves. And then, having laid claim to what they have not earned, they wonder why everything around them spirals into chaos.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower