Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“Gansey despised raising his voice (in his head, his mother said, People shout when they don't have the vocabulary to whisper), but he heard it happening despite himself and so, with effort, he kept his voice even. "Not like this. At least you have a place to go. 'End of the world'... What is your problem, Adam? I mean, is there something about my place that's too repugnant for you to imagine living there? Why is it that everything kind I do is pity to you? Everything is charity. Well, here it is: I'm sick of tiptoeing around your principles."
"God, I'm sick of your condescension, Gansey," Adam said. "Don't try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don't pretend you're not trying to make me feel stupid."
"This is the way I talk. I'm sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant. He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive."
Both of them stopped breathing.
Gansey knew he'd gone too far. It was too far, too late, too much.
Adam shoved open the door.
"Fuck you, Gansey. Fuck you," he said, voice low and furious.
Gansey close his eyes.
Adam slammed the door, and then he slammed it again when the latch didn't catch. Gansey didn't open his eyes. He didn't want to see if people were watching some kid fight with a boy in a bright orange Camaro and an Aglionby jumper. Just then he hated his raven-breasted uniform and his loud car and every three- and four-syllable word his parents had used in casual conversation at the dinner table and he hated Adam's hideous father and Adam's permissive mother and most of all, most of all, he hated the sound of Adam's last words, playing over and over.
He couldn't stand it, all of this inside him.
In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year.
They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.
Gansey opened his eyes. The ambulance was still there, but Adam was gone.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”
― Paarthurnax

“You wouldn't believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.”
― Jean-Paul Sarte, No Exit

“Orestes: How could you recognize me after all these years?
Elektra: What a stupid question. I was born knowing you.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Cicada

Sick of his own face,
sick of his skin, of the dark,
he crawls outside himself
to sing–

a better poet than most.”
― Hosho McCreesh

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
― Maya Angelou

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
― C.S. Lewis

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Monsters are tragic beings; they are born too tall, too strong, too heavy, they are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy.”
― Ishiro Honda

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”
― Stephen King, It

“Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.”
― Stephen King, It

“Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”
― Stephen King, It

“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..”
― Stephen King, It

“None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you see it, you'll never make it through the night”
― Leia Organa

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

“The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
― James Baldwin

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
― Stanisław Jerzy Lec

“But no, "R." No sleep of the innocent. Not for you. Did you forget? You have blood on your hands. On your lips. On your teeth. Smile for the cameras.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
― Kait Rokowski

“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“It's pathetic, I knew I did from that first moment we met. It was...not love at first sight exactly, but - familiarity. Like: oh, hello, it's you. It's going to be you. Game over."
-Ben”
― Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
― James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

“Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm