Mathilde > Mathilde's Quotes

“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.”
― Patti Smith, M Train: A Memoir

“Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.”
― patti smith

“I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ...”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Some things melt before they become memories.”
― Patti Smith, Devotion

“Perhaps it’s not where we’re going but just that we go.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“All doors are open to the believer.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that she was.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be...”
― Joan Didion

“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

“...real intimacy is a place where there are no mistakes, at least not in the sense you feel. You don't just blow everything with one wrong move. A friendship is a space where you're supposted and free to make mistakes.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“If you don't try, nothing ever changes.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset,”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“He might as well plant an oak in a flowerpot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions