aw. > aw.'s Quotes

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“While freedom gives rise to growth and enlightenment, permission allows evil to flourish in a light of day that would otherwise destroy it.”
― Neal Shusterman, Thunderhead

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You can’t do this for me,” he said. “I won’t let you.”
“It’s not for you. It’s not a favor. It’s the cruelest thing I could do.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“She recognized the way he was looking at her. It was how she’d once looked at Altan. It was the way she’d seen Daji look at Riga—that look of wretched, desperate, and reproachful loyalty. It said, Do it. Take what you want, it said. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you. Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

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

“How ironic, then, and how poetic, that humankind may have created the Creator out of want for one. Man creates God, who then creates man. Is that not the perfect circle of life? But then, if that turns out to be the case, who is created in whose image?”
― Neal Shusterman, Thunderhead

“The cruelest walls are made of glass.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Come back down,” he said, his expression suddenly grim. His fingers clenched tight around hers. “Listen, Rin. I don’t care what else happens up there. But you come back to me.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Nothing lasts. The world does not exist.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I wish I had one friend I wasn’t destined to lose.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“A billion stars go spinning through the night,
glittering above your head,
But in you is the presence that will be
when all the stars are dead.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“What were you before you met me?"
"I think I was drowning"
"And what are you now?"
"Water”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I choose to be known as scythe Anastasia
after the youngest member of the family Romanov
she was the product of a corrupt system, and because of that, was denied her very life—as I almost was
had she lived who knows what she might have done. perhaps she could have changed the world and redeemed her family name. choose to be scythe Anastasia. I vow to become the change that night have been”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“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

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“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 a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“But why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You're a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I'm wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. "Good for you, man" a man once said to me at a party, "you're making a killing with poetry. You're knockin' em dead.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous