ari > ari's Quotes

“For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“A reading major, that's what he wants. No response papers, no exams, no analysis, just the reading.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Having a physical reaction to a lack of book is not unusual.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Reading a book four times in one day is perfectly normal behavior.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“I have literally always been the kid who believes in fairy tales but I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t a kid, I was a twenty-something in a cocktail bar who never feels old enough to drink”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will. He tells her things he has never told anyone.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“It’s too normal. It’s disconcerting and making him dizzy and maybe once you go to wonderland you’re supposed to stay there because nothing will ever be the same in the real world, in the other world, afterward.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Books are always better when read than explained.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“He wishes he had brought the wine-colored book with him, but he is trying to make a point of not having his nose constantly in a book. It is an attempt to appear friendlier that he's not certain is working yet.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“You want to be in the story, not observing it from the outside. You want to be under its shell. The only way to do that is to break it. But if it breaks, it is gone.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Sometimes he feels he has lost his own story, fallen out of its pages and landed here, in between. But he remains in his story. He cannot leave it, no matter how he tries.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional. He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“know thyself and learn to suffer”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“...she looks up from her book with a dazed expression he's used to wearing himself, the disorientation of being pulled out of one world and back into an other”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“He believes in books, he thinks as he leaves the room. That much he knows for sure.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“You have no friends. And all of this is a fabrication. Your brain’s feeble attempt to preserve itself. Telling itself a story with love and adventure and mystery. All of those things you wanted in your life that you were too busy playing your games and reading your books to go out and find. Your wasted life is ending, that is why you are here.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I found myself grinning until my cheeks hurt, my scalp prickling till I thought it might lift off my head. My tongue ran away from me, giddy with freedom. This, and this, and this, I said to him. I did not have to fear that I spoke too much. I did not have to worry that I was too slender, or too slow. This and this and this! I taught him how to skip stones, and he taught me how to carve wood. I could feel every nerve in my body, every brush of air against my skin.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright were they dull.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am air and thought and can do nothing.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I did not plan to live after he was gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles