Carolina > Carolina's Quotes

“The people you love weren’t algebra: to be calculated, subtracted, or held at arm’s length across a decimal point.”
― Holly Jackson, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

“I bite", Ava says, sliding out of the booth. "It’s a terrible, voluntary affliction".”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“If there’s one thing I dislike more than being hurt, it’s being seen to be hurt. I’ve always preferred to creep away and lick my wounds in private.”
― Ruth Ware, In a Dark, Dark Wood

“And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Li que existem três maneiras de lidar com o medo da morte. A primeira é a repressão. Esquecer que a morte existe e agir como se nunca fosse chegar. A maioria de nós vive assim. A segunda é se lembrar da morte o tempo inteiro, e viver cada dia como se fosse o último. E a terceira é a aceitação. Uma pessoa que realmente aceita a morte não tem medo de nada. Fica em paz, mesmo quando está prestes a perder tudo. Sabe o que essas três opções têm em comum?” Fiz que não. Para mim, seria mais fácil morrer de uma vez do que ficar pensando nessas coisas esquisitas. “Todas são mentiras. São apenas máscaras para o medo.” “Então, o que é verdade?” “O medo, eu acho. O medo é o mais honesto de todos os sentimentos.”
― Jeong You Jeong

“He smiled, put his hands on the back of her neck, fingers in her hair, and leaned in to press his forehead against hers. He’d told her before that he did it to take away half her sadness, half her headache, half her nerves before her Columbia interview. Because half less of a bad thing meant there was room for half good.”
― Holly Jackson, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

“People don’t change,” Nina said bitterly. “They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves.”
― Ruth Ware, In a Dark, Dark Wood

“I kept peeling off layers of my personality, but I seemed to be going in circles. Every time I thought I’d worked out what I really enjoyed, I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I just didn’t enjoy anything any more.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“What's the lesson here, Smackie?
Don't jump to conclusions?
Never lower your gaze first.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“What a pain I thought, wondering why everyone felt such a need for reassurance.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive.

But what is important is that you know it was not all terrible. There was peace in long stretches, between each crisis. A chance to cool and solidify before the grind resumed.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“I'm not sure I'm the good girl i once thought i was . I've lost her along the way”
― Holly Jackson, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

“Maybe people who thought they were being violated felt a bit better when they attacked other people in the same way.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“Revenge begets revenge; the anger is unquenchable. We become the monsters we are trying to punish. Justice, however, brings closure, and that is what I want. It can only be achieved by remaining sober-minded and rational. And, in the end, it is not my place to punish the prince. It is the king’s, and only the king’s. All I can do is find enough evidence to make the truth undeniable.”
― June Hur, The Red Palace

“I think,” Juna says after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterwards. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realise that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“Men wants us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds.”
― Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow

“Maybe I was still kicking at a dead man’s corpse, daring him to come at me again.”
― Camilla Bruce, In the Garden of Spite

“They'll never let you do it!"

I pulled myself up straight and faced him squarely, the way I did when uttering the store pledge in the morning ritual, and I said, "No. It's not a matter of whether they permit it or not. It's what I am. For the human me, it probably is convenient to have you around, Shiraha, to keep my family and friends off my back. But the animal me, the convenience store worker, has absolutely no use for you whatsoever."

I was wasting time talking like this. I had to get myself back in shape for the sake of the store. I had to restructure my body so it would be able to move more swiftly and precisely to replenish the refrigerated drinks or clean the floor, to more perfectly comply with the store's demands.

"That's grotesque. You're not human!" he spat.

That's what I've been trying to tell you! I thought.”
― Sayaka Murata, コンビニ人間 [Konbini ningen]

“Maybe we’ll all have to get used to the uncertainty. Maybe that’s what frightens me. The way you can get used to anything if you’ve got nothing better to gravitate toward.”
― Malcolm Devlin, And Then I Woke Up

“When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper worn finer by the friction of history. (“So you were slaves, so what?” they whisper. Like it’s nothing.)”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“Mundo cão, rapaz. Se você não estiver muito bem regulado, vai sacudir, espernear e rolar, antes de completar 30 anos.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“You're an idiot,' said Mum, when I relayed to her the entire situation on Wednesday. 'Not an unintelligent idiot, but a sort of naive idiot who manages to fall into a difficult situation and then can't get out out of it because she's too awkward.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Abby Rivers and Gretchen Lang were best friends, on and off, for seventy-five years, and there aren’t many people who can say that. They weren’t perfect. They didn’t always get along. They screwed up. They acted like assholes. They fought, they fell out, they patched things up, they drove each other crazy, and they didn’t make it to Halley’s Comet. But they tried.”
― Grady Hendrix, My Best Friend's Exorcism

“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“A book is made of paper but a story is a tree.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea