Ginny > Ginny's Quotes

“I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“Accept that this experience taught you something you didn't want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it's going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“But love doesn't make a mean drunk not a mean drunk or a narcissist not a narcissist or a jackass not a jackass.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“If I could go back in time I'd make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn't know what I couldn't know until I became a mom, and so I'm certain there are things I don't know because I can't know because I did. Who would I have nurtured had I not been nurturing my two children over these past seven years? In what creative and practical forces would my love have been gathered up? What didn't I write because I was catching my children at the bottoms of slides and spotting them as they balanced along the tops of low brick walls and pushing them endlessly in swings? What did I write because I did? Would I be happier and more intelligent and prettier if I had been free all this time to read in silence on a couch that sat opposite of Mr. Sugar's? Would I complain less? Has sleep deprivation and the consumption of an exorbitant number of Annie's Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies taken years off my life or added years onto it? Who would I have met if I had bicycled across Iceland and hiked around Mongolia and what would I have experienced and where would that have taken me?

I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn't safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“I know its a kick in the pants to hear that the problem is you, but it's also fucking fantastic. You are, after all, the only person you can change.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“His life is like your life and my life and all the lives of all the people who are reading these words right now. It’s a roiling stew of fear and need and desire and love and the hunger to be loved. And mostly, it’s the latter.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There

“Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people,” which is true enough, but truer still is hell is other people’s boyfriends”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“Will you do it later or will you do it now?”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“A glorious something else awaits.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart. If you let it, your jealousy will devour you.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“so long as you stay in a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs, you’re in a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There

“Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.”
― Werner Herzog

“Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.”
― Werner Herzog

“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”
― Werner Herzog

“Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?”
― Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

“Even though he was afraid to admit it, when he was with her it seemed it was worth doing all those normal things that normal people do.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“but his eyes were too dark for her to make out any spark in them”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“she and Mattia were united by an invisible, elastic thread, buried under a pile of meaningless things, a thread that could exist only between two people like themselves: two people who had acknowledged their own solitude within the other.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“They weren't smiling and were looking in opposite directions, but it was as if their bodies flowed smoothly into each other's, through their arms and fingers. . . . There was a shared space between their bodies, the confines of which were not well delineated, from which nothing seemed to be missing and in which the air seemed motionless, undisturbed.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“Morning had gotten lost on the way home. We would lie this way forever, always saying goodbye, never parting.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“If there's one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it's that you can't fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It's a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.”
― Cheryl Strayed

“The body knows. When your heart sinks. When you feel sick to your gut. When something blossoms in your chest. When your brain gloriously pops. That’s your body telling you the One True Thing. Listen to it.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough: A Collection of Inspirational Quotes

“And so I walked on.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar