S. > S.'s Quotes

“Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“ubiquitous, adj.

When it’s going well, the fact of it is everywhere. It’s there in the song that shuffles into your ears. It’s there in the book you’re reading. It’s there on the shelves of the store as you reach for a towel and forget about the towel. It’s there as you open the door. As you stare off into the subway, it’s what you’re looking at. You wear it on the inside of your hat. It lines your pockets. It’s the temperature.
The hitch, of course, it that when it’s going badly, it’s in all the same places.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.

I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“It is wearing your pajamas and watching Lord of the Rings the day before Christmas, it is sitting in your window watching the weather while sipping your favorite tea, and it is looking into the bonfire on summer solstice surrounded by your friends and family while your twistbread slowly bakes.”
― Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living

“These ways we have to settle. Moving house. I hate packing: collecting myself up, pulling myself apart. Stripping the body of the house: the walls, the floors, the shelves. Then I arrive, an empty house. It looks like a shell. How I love unpacking. Taking things out, putting things around, arranging myself all over the walls. I move around, trying to distribute myself evenly around the rooms. I concentrate on the kitchen. The familiar smell of spices fills the air. I allow the cumin to spill, and then gather it up again. I feel flung back somewhere else. I am never sure where the smell of spices takes me, as it had followed me everywhere. Each smell that gathers returns me somewhere; I am not always sure where that somewhere is. Sometimes the return is welcome, sometimes not. Sometimes it is tears or laughter that makes me realize that I have been pulled to another place and another time. Such memories can involve a recognition of how one's body already feels, coming after the event. The surprise when we find ourselves moved in this way or that. So we ask the question, later, and it often seems too late: what is it that has led me away from the present, to another place and another time? How is it that I have arrived here or there?”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“I wish I could be as subtle and beautiful. All I know how to do is scream.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“That's the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“ritual—any ritual—establishes a certain kind of mindset; perhaps this is why rituals benefit even those who claim they’re not important. When a routine works for us, we don’t have to pay attention to it, but a ritual calls us to fully participate in what we’re doing—even if it’s as simple as savoring a cup of tea. The specific action doesn’t matter, but its rhythm, regularity, and meaning do.”
― Anne Bogel, Don't Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy to Your Life

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“He would come to share her joys until he could no longer separate them from his own, and then one day, maybe turning to her at a party or rushing to ask in a text message, he would say: What's that thing I like? And she would know the answer. She would know everything.
Eventually, all the answers to all that he was would be cradled in the palms of her hands.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I want you to say everything, anything. I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“The conversation hadn’t so much died on us as been taken out back and shot in the head. And I knew I should be playing paramedic but I couldn’t quite bring myself to or work out how.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

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

“You are just in the same room with me & my unsweet, uncharming, completely uninteresting sadness. I wish it could unbelong itself from me, unstick from my face.”
― Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“I’m envious of the clouds who can from time to time fall completely apart & everyone just says, It’s raining, & someone might even bring cats & dogs into it, no one says, Stop being so dramatic or You should see a professional.”
― Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“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

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Nonstalgia (noun) The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Language is humanity's most spectacular open source project.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“Our practice taught me most of all to read like a free, mysterious person who was encountering free, mysterious things; to value the profound privacy and irregularity of my own thinking; to spend time in my head and the heads of others, and to see myself shimmer in many worlds—to let many worlds shimmer, lively, in me.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“Like a page, we are only legible when opened to one another.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry