Michaela Edson > Michaela's Quotes

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’. In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together -if and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“And I think if I believed in God, I wouldn't want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it's impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“I never believed in Santa Claus. None of us kids did. Mom and Dad refused to let us. They couldn't afford expensive presents and they didn't want us to think we weren't as good as other kids who, on Christmas morning, found all sorts of fancy toys under the tree that were supposedly left by Santa Claus.
Dad had lost his job at the gypsum, and when Christmas came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each one of us kids out into the desert night one by one.
"Pick out your favorite star", Dad said.
"I like that one!" I said.
Dad grinned, "that's Venus", he said. He explained to me that planets glowed because reflected light was constant and stars twinkled because their light pulsed.
"I like it anyway" I said.
"What the hell," Dad said. "It's Christmas. You can have a planet if you want."
And he gave me Venus.

Venus didn't have any moons or satellites or even a magnetic field, but it did have an atmosphere sort of similar to Earth's, except it was super hot-about 500 degrees or more. "So," Dad said, "when the sun starts to burn out and Earth turns cold, everyone might want to move to Venus to get warm. And they'll have to get permission from your descendants first.
We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. "Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten," Dad said, "you'll still have your stars.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Again and again he told me I wasn't myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I'd always been. I'd just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“and I return to my desk, where the round, blank eyes of a dozen Funko Pops stare me down. They’re some of the few things I’ve managed to unpack and my only companions. They remind me of the Precious Moments figurines that populated my grandmother’s living room, a thought that’s both comforting and a little unsettling.”
― Alexis Daria, Only Santas in the Building

“her knowing grin and propensity to bring me home-cooked food reminds me of my own grandmother, who died this past summer, leaving behind a void that will never be filled.”
― Alexis Daria, Only Santas in the Building

“My greatest weakness has always been my desire for love. It is a yawning chasm within me, and the more that I reach for it, the more easily I am tricked. I am a walking bruise, an open sore. If Oak is masked, I am a face with all the skin ripped off. Over and over, I have told myself that I need to guard against my own yearnings, but that hasn’t worked. I must try something new.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“Over and over, I have told myself that I need to guard against my own yearnings, but that hasn’t worked. I must try something new.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“It looked like the sword of someone in an anime he’d been watching, and he felt like a badass, holding it in his hands.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“A night breeze floated through the open windows, ruffling my hair, drying the cold sweat on me. The dark sky beckoned, the stars so dim and small, like speckles of frost.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“I tried not to start bleating like cattle.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“And when I was Made anew,” I said, “I followed that bond back—to me. I knew that home was on the other end of it.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury