nate > nate's Quotes

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“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

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.”
― Patti Smith

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“...the world never turned out the way you wanted it to. It simply turned. And you hung on.”
― Sarah Winman, Still Life

“We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Though I suppose each experience like this, just like everyone's loneliness, feels uniquely uncategorizable—the particular contours of another person's borders that collide with your own before leaving behind a crater that will be there the rest of your life.”
― Teddy Wayne, Apartment

“Privilege is a peculiar possession. To those who possess it, privilege is weightless, tasteless, odorless, soundless, and colorless. Those who have the least access to it are painfully aware of its mass, density, taste, odor, texture, sound, and color.”
― Sharmila Sen, Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am made of memories.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood, like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“He loved October. Had always loved it. There was something sad and beautiful about it - the ending and beginning of things.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, If You Come Softly

“Romance at short notice was her specialty.”
― Saki, The Open Window and Other Short Stories

“Miracles are disruptive. When the dust settles there is always damage done – not all the hungry are fed, and not all the sick are healed.”
― Richard Beard, Lazarus Is Dead

“Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.”
― Emma Cline, The Guest

“You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Soon I hear the call of birds, and I’m reminded of their flight, of their dazzling nature to be splendid beings to which we can look up and remember the flight of our own lives.”
― Nathanael Koah, Birds on a Carousel

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.”
― Ali Smith, How to be Both

“I’m sorry. This is not what I intended to say. What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“The truth is I'm in a place without a bright side or a one best thing. I'm in a place where, honest to God, you feel you can kill your friends just by asking the names of stars.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K