Em > Em's Quotes

“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. 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

“But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again,”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sometimes he wonders whether this very idea of loneliness is something he would feel at all had he not been awakened to the fact that he should be feeling lonely, that there is something strange and unnacceptable about the life he has.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“The truth often lies, unclaimed, in the middle.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“It's very arresting, happiness. You should know that I'm someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience.”
― Otessa Moshfegh

“Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself.”
― Otessa Moshfegh

“And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. and that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“but most of all I hated the smallness of life here, and how even though it was so small, I was unable to solve the mystery whose central question I could still not determine.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“Age, then, is not something that can be understood; it is a preoccupation of the old, and the old is anyone older than oneself.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she’ll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings: hunger and thirst, a desire to speak Swedish, a physical desire to swim or dance.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People