Flo > Flo's Quotes

“She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept”
― Celeste Ng

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“The whole time we were together, why didn't you tell me any of this?

I don't know. I suppose I didn't want you to think I was damaged or something. I was probably afraid you didn't want me anymore.

Finally he puts his face in his hands. His fingers feel cold and clammy on his eyelids and there are tears in his eyes. The harder he presses with his fingers, the faster the tears seep out, wet, onto his skin. Jesus, he says. His voice sounds thick and he clears his throat. Come here, he says. And she comes to him. He feels terribly ashamed and confused. They lie face-to-face and he puts his arms around her body. In her ear he says: I'm sorry, okay? She holds onto him tightly, her arms winding around him, and he kisses her forehead.
But he always thought she was damaged, he thought it anyway.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It depressed her to think people were so predictable.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“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

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“But now there is a loneliness so deep it sends me foetal”
― Kae Tempest, Hold Your Own

“I move like the boys,
I talk like the boys,
but my words are my own.”
― Kae Tempest, Hold Your Own

“But one day,
he'll be hunch-backed, riddled with pain;
Desperate for love but too weak to enjoy it.
Mumbling at strangers on trains, 'how strange
that when we have youth we're so keen to destroy it.”
― Kae Tempest, Hold Your Own

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“How many yous have you been?
How many,
Lined up inside,
Each killing the last?”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“And the days are all dust
and the only thing worse
than losing the trust
of a lover is finding the rust
in their kiss.”
― Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

“Ideas are such perfect things.
But as soon as they're made real
they're cringing, clunky, turgid things,
so difficult to wield.”
― Kae Tempest, Hold Your Own

“There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words - but shades, penumbras.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice.

...Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn't have to live on one side or the other?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been? Where have we been, Ma?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous