Julie Beth > Julie's Quotes

“Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“To be from countries such as ours... is to continually feel obliged to explain them.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“And violence demands translation.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“Independence, which I had up to then held in very high regard, indeed revered it, was now to me a curse, the devil himself. It is dependence that a sane mind should seek; to depend on others and be in turn dependable.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“At first I thought, to be a parent you have to be an idealist. Then I learnt that to be a parent is to be continually coming up against everything that is not ideal about you.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“The oddity of revenge is that it leaves you defeated.”
― Hisham Matar, My Friends

“How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he's finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else's?”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Gehen, ging, gegangen

“Have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace - so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world - inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Gehen, ging, gegangen

“Learning to stop wanting things is probably one of the most difficult lessons of getting old.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

“I was neither old enough to have made myself a heron young enough to have escaped the newsreel images or the long dark shadows that the returning soldiers dragged behind them like empty coffins. For no one ever really wins a war: some just lose a little less than others.”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“They occupied no-man's-land between adolescence and adulthood, where insecurity and innocence, joy and world-weary cynicism do battle, where different masks are tried on for size”
― Benjamin Myers, The Offing

“The words you can’t find, you borrow.
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
We are not quite novels.
The analogy he is looking for is almost there.
We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.
In the end, we are collected works.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.

No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly. Over and over, until the end of time.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“Every man should leave a story better than he found it’,”
― Sally Page, The Keeper of Stories

“there is extraordinary strength and goodness within normal, everyday people and, because of this, there is always hope.”
― Sally Page, The Keeper of Stories

“she is a simple, homely bowl into which they can pour their confidences.”
― Sally Page, The Keeper of Stories

“knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid,”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“I wonder, was I always lonely? I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at home in the world, but I’m not sure that’s unique.”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives;”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

“But she also knew that this was the tenderness of wanting a person you care about to avoid this kind of pain. Maybe every single moment of loving someone you helped make was connected to this low-level terror that hurt your heart.”
― Kevin Wilson, Run for the Hills: A Novel

“That was all family had to be, at the most basic level, someone seeing you, even if you didn't know what they saw.”
― Kevin Wilson, Run for the Hills: A Novel

“How lovely it must be to be an age at which you wanted to add quarters rather than subtract decades.”
― Clare Pooley, How to Age Disgracefully

“Hope, he had learned, was more painful than acceptance.”
― Clare Pooley, How to Age Disgracefully