Miriam > Miriam's Quotes

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I think the beauty industry is responsible for some of the worst ugliness we see around us in our visual environment, and the worst, most false aesthetic ideal, which is the ideal of consumerism.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“But we all have something wrong with us anyway, don't we? I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special - which is fair, who doesn’t - but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Knowing is the key to caring, and with caring there is hope that people will be motivated to take positive actions. They might not care even if they know, but they can’t care if they are unaware.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“The bottom line answer to the question about why biodiversity matters is fairly simple: The rest of the living world can get along without us, but we can’t get along without them.”
― Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

“People are shitty for a lot of reasons. Sometimes they're just shitty people. Sometimes people have been shitty to them and, even though they don't realize it, they take that shitty upbringing and go out into the world and treat others the same way. Sometimes they're shitty because they're afraid. Sometimes they choose to be shitty to others before others can be shitty to them. So it's like self-defensive shittiness.”
― Jennifer Niven, Holding Up the Universe

“Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Wie oft wohl muss einer das, was er weiß, noch einmal lernen, wieder und wieder entdecken, wie viele Verkleidungen abreißen, bis er Dinge wirklich versteht bis auf die Knochen? Reicht überhaupt eine Lebenszeit dafür aus?”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Gehen, ging, gegangen

“So, you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as the rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty - rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the authors ideology and biases.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“…there is no such thing as humane colonization.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality––Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom––but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself––his very life––has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don't.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“It's in silence we know ourselves, vampire. It's in stillness we hear the questions that truly matter, scratching like baby birds on the eggshells of our eyes. Who am I? What do I want? What have I become? Truth is, the questions you hear in the quiet are always the most terrifying, because most people never take the time to listen to the answers. They dance. And they sing. And they fight. And they fuck. And they drown, filling their gullets with piss and their lungs with smoke and their heads with shit so they never have to learn the truth of who the fuck they are. Put a man in a room for a hundred years with a thousand books, and he’ll know a million truths. Put him in a room for a year with silence, and he’ll know himself.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire

“Put a man in a room for a hundred years with a thousand books, and he’ll know a million truths. Put him in a room for a year with silence, and he’ll know himself.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire