Manav > Manav's Quotes

“You know, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I feel very, very alone."

"We're all alone, Reva," I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you're scared of what it means to do so.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“There are two kinds of hot girls: Evil Hot Girls, and Hot Girls Who Are Also Sympathetic Good-Hearted People and Will Not Intentionally Destroy Your Life (HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL).”
― Jesse Andrews, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“You have this maddening little smile sometimes, like you've just thought of something incredibly witty but are afraid to say it in case no one gets the joke.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“You're better off without me.

And I don't want to be around when you realize it.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“It’s like . . . I’m paranoid about people borrowing my laptop because I’m convinced they’ll find some secret document on there that would make the whole world think I’m a terrible person—something I don’t even remember writing. And it doesn’t matter that there’s no document like that. I’m still terrified, you know?”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“All wisdom ends in paradox.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I'm so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness....Sometimes I'm so lonely I'm not even on that map.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“The trick is to metabolize pain as energy. Learn, when hit by loss, to ask the right question: "What next?" instead of "Why me?”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You