Sawyer > Sawyer's Quotes

“Growing up and seeing your parents' flaws is like losing your religion. I don't believe in God anymore. I don't believe in my father either.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.”
― Angie Sijun Lou

“The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“So I came to the realization: Nothing in life is unfair. It's just life.”
― Rob Lowe, Stories I Only Tell My Friends

“They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.”
― Rob Lowe, Stories I Only Tell My Friends

“That loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn’t make them any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn’t diminish the love. It just changes forms.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“You’re taking up space in another human’s brain, she said. You’re a foreign entity. A parasite. That’s a lot by itself.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“Why do we write? A chorus erupts.
Because we cannot simply live.”
― Patti Smith, Devotion

“We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.”
― Patti Smith, Devotion

“If I were to describe a typical New York conversation it would be two people waiting for their turn to talk.”
― Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour

“Seeing someone you used to love is like visiting a house you once lived in.”
― Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour

“A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“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

“Mosscap considered. “Because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful,” it said.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I wish I could understand experiences I’m incapable of having.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I appreciate the intent. I really do. But if you don’t want to infringe upon my agency, let me have agency.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“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

“How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“The thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“I read a book while you were sleeping,” Mosscap said, holding up its pocket computer. “And I would really like to discuss it with you.” Dex blinked twice. “You woke me up to talk about a book?”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“none of us are children long enough to love it”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother