Dini ♉️ > Dini ♉️'s Quotes

“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 problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you'd been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you're nothing once again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit." Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. "Can you believe our luck?" Max said. "We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit!"
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had hey just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“There is no purity to bearing pain alone.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“I'd gotten so used to seeing her unhappy at home that the joy on her face seemed scandalous to me, a deceit, a lie that had to be exposed as soon as possible.”
― Édouard Louis, Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme

“She would tell me stories about the family or about the neighbors, but I'd never listen. I'd complain: Stop talking so much! I couldn't see that she spoke to ease the boredom, the precise duplication of hours and days that life with my father imposed upon her, and that for her, as it would be for me many years later, the telling of her life's story was the best remedy she could think of to help her bear the weight of her existence.”
― Édouard Louis, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“My mother had a baby, and her mother had a baby, and her mother had a baby. Every woman in my family before me lived to have a baby—just so that baby could grow up to have another baby. If I don’t have a baby, then all of those women reproduced just so that I could exist. I am the final product. I am the final baby.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“Of course I’m a fraud. The fact that I’m able to carry myself through life without being crushed beneath the psychological weight of being alive proves that I’m a con artist. Aren’t we all con artists?”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“It’s strange people don’t like how their bodies look. It’s strange we waste any of our time concerning ourselves with how our skin drapes over our bones or how fat cultivates.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“I asked myself, “Is there anything I want right now?” and then answered “fries.” I therefore decided to buy the fries instead of killing myself because that seemed logical. You shouldn't kill yourself when you still want to eat.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“I wish that I find something distracting enough to occupy my mind with thoughts unrelated to the futility of my existence, or that I die in the least disruptive way possible for my family.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing.”
― Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women: The Extremism Nobody is Talking About

“The world made a whore of me, now I'll make a whorehouse of the world”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der alten Dame

“Die Welt machte mich zu einer Hure, nun mache ich sie zu einem Bordell.”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der alten Dame / Die Physiker. Erläuterungen und Materialien.

“Warum muß es immer so gemacht werden, wie es früher gemacht wurde? Wenn das konsequent geschähen wäre, säßen wir heute noch auf den Bäumen!”
― Erich Kästner, Fabian. Die Geschichte eines Moralisten

“Dass man lebt, ist Zufall; dass man stirbt, ist gewiss.”
― Erich Kästner, Fabian. Die Geschichte eines Moralisten

“Ich liebe das Leben", gestand der Alte und wurde fast verlegen. "Ich liebe das Leben erst recht, seit ich arm bin. Manchmal könnte ich vor Freude in den Sonnenschein hineinbeißen oder in die Luft, die in den Parks weht. Wissen Sie, woran das liegt? Ich denke oft an den Tod, und wer tut das heute? Niemand denkt an den Tod. Jeder lässt sich von ihm überraschen wie von einem Eisenbahnzusammenstoß oder einer anderen unvorhergesehenen Katastrophe. So dumm sind die Menschen geworden. Ich denke täglich an ihn, denn täglich kann er winken. Und weil ich an ihn denke, liebe ich das Leben.”
― Erich Kästner, Fabian. Die Geschichte eines Moralisten

“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“I don't know how to talk.
Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“MRS ALLONBY I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
HESTER I think the stupid people talk a great deal.
MRS ALLONBY Ah, I never listen!”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“To win back my youth, there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.”
― Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance