Jes > Jes's Quotes

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus, he was real nice."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Dill?"
Mm?"
Why do you reckon Boo Radleys never run off?"
Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me.
Maybe he doesn't have anywhere to run off to”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Do you defend niggers, Atticus?" I asked him that evening.
"Of course I do. Don't say nigger, Scout. That's common."
"'s what everybody at school says."
"From now on it'll be everybody less one--"
"Well if you don't want me to grow up talkin' that way, why do you send me to school?”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I never loved reading until I feared I would lose it. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Turtles don't feel, stupid," said Jem.

"Were you ever a turtle, huh?”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I would lead him through the house, but I would never lead him home”
― Harper Lee

“Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

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

“You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“You really work in those conditions?”

She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: “And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?”

They didn’t answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn’t tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.

But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“What is the part that makes us want to love someone who doesn't love us back?

Don't focus on that.

What should I focus on, then?

THat the probability of any person being around is one in a trillion, so it's almost a zero percent chance of you being here. But you're going to have, you know, eight billion people, and those eight billion people have won the lottery. And the worst part is that nobody realizes that! They don't realize what a rare opportunity they have to observe this universe, because here's this amazing universe, and if humans hadn't evolved to this stage, they wouldn't know they were living in this beautiful place.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“It wasn't that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one-and isn't that rare! Why is it so hard to meet in this life? But the deeper question was: What was one supposed to do with such people? Fuck them, love them, or leave them alone? Yet they seemed to call out to be acted upon.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“People born from the bird egg are interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning”.
“People born from a fish egg appear in flotation of jelly, and this jelly contains hundreds and thousands of eggs, where the most important thing is not any individual egg, but the condition of the many”.
“People born from the bear egg is like a child holding on to their very best doll. Bears do not have a pragmatic way of thinking, and which their favorites can be sacrificed for some higher end. Bears claim a few people to love and protect, and feel untared by their choice; they are turned towards those they can smell and touch”.”
― Sheila Heti

“But you know Hajime, some feelings cause us pain because they remain.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“They’re on a pedestal from the second they’re born, only they don’t realize it. Whenever they need something, their moms come running. They’re taught to believe that their penises make them superior, and that women are just there for them to use as they see fit. Then they go out into the world, where everything centers around them and their dicks. And it’s women who have to make it work. At the end of the day, where is this pain that men feel coming from? In their opinion: us. It’s all our fault—whether they’re unpopular, broke, jobless. Whatever it is, they blame women for all of their failures, all their problems. Now think about women. No matter how you see it, who’s actually responsible for the majority of the pain women feel? If you think about it that way, how could a man and a woman ever see eye to eye? It’s structurally impossible.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Then there are the real bastards, like my ex,” she shook her head. “He went around, patting himself on the back, like he’s so much better than all those men. ‘I know the pain that women feel, I respect women. I’ve written papers about it, I know where all the landmines are. My favorite author is Virginia Woolf’ and all that . . . So fucking what, though, right? How many times did you clean the house last month? How many times did you cook? How many times did you go grocery shopping?” I laughed.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Yeah, my mum was free labor—free labor with a pussy.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs