Jill > Jill's Quotes

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess. And you too. I kinda wish people still wrote like that. History, huh? Bet we could make some.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“History, huh?”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Oh my God, I thought you were getting into international relations or something.”
“I mean, technically—”
“If you finish that sentence, I’m gonna spend tonight in jail.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Dear Thisbe,
I wish there weren’t a wall.
Love, Pyramus”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I don’t know who YOU think you’re kidding you Hufflepuff-ass bitch”
― Casey Mcquiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“But the first time I saw you. Rio. I took that down to the gardens. I pressed it into the leaves of a silver maple and recited it to the Waterloo Vase. It didn’t fit in any rooms.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart, There's so much of you.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Bisexuality is truly a rich and complex tapestry.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“If there's any legacy for me on this earth, I want it to be true.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I’ve always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“You're literally putting your dick in the leader of a foreign state”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Christ, you are as thick as it gets,' he says, and he grabs Alex's face in both hands and kisses him.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“The class is Ethical Issues in International Relations. He really has got to stop taking classes so painfully relevant to his life.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“One does not foster a lifelong love of Star Wars without knowing an “empire” isn’t a good thing.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Wait!” Alex yells up to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”

Up close, it’s beautiful. Two stories tall. He can’t imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast.

It’s a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other.

He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet: Never tell me the odds.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I want you—"
"Then fucking have me."
"—but I don't want this."
Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room.
"What does that even mean?"
"I don't want it!" Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. "Don't you bloody see? I'm not like you. I can't afford to be reckless. I don't have a family who will support me. I don't go about shoving who I am in everyone's faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I'm allowed, all right, and it doesn't make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don't get to come here and call me a coward for it.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Diaz, you insane, hopeless romantic little shit," says the voice of the President of the United States, muffled in the bed. "It had better be forever. Be safe.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Er," Henry says, adding to the list of vowel sounds he has to show for himself. It is, unfortunately, also sexy. After all these weeks, the bar is low.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Oh, like, I thought we were already there with you being bi and everything. Sorry, are we not? Did I skip ahead again? My bad. Hello, would you like to come out to me? I'm listening.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they’re inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Here,' Alex says, moving his own hips, 'watch me.'
With a grave gulp of champagne, Henry says, 'I am.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I don’t know!” he half yells, miserably. “Am I? Do you think I’m bi?” “I can’t tell you that, Alex!” she says. “That’s the whole point!” “Shit,” he says, dropping his head back on the cushions. “I need someone to just tell me. How did you know you were?” “I don’t know, man. I was in my junior year of high school, and I touched a boob. It wasn’t very profound. Nobody’s gonna write an Off-Broadway play about it.” “Really helpful.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured, It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“He often makes blithe remarks about things he 'wishes'. I wish you didn't have to go, he says when she's leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it “the pleasure of being touched by great art.” In those words it almost sounds sexual.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People