Valentina > Valentina 's Quotes

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau).”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Do you fall in love often?"

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?”
― Jeanette Winterson

“She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“do it from the heart or not at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
― Richard Siken

“How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“I wonder- if nobody is listening to my voice, am I making any sound at all?”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“Give your friendships the magic you would give a romance. Because they're just as important. Actually, for us, they're way more important.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“I wonder sometimes whether you've exploded already, like a star, and what I'm seeing you is three million years into the past, and you're not here anyore. How can we be together here, now, when you are so far away. When you are so far ago? I'm shouting so loudly, but you never turn around to see me. Perhaps it is I who have already exploded. Either way, we are going to bring beautiful things into the universe.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“I've learnt some Things. Like the way friendship can be just as intense, beautiful and endless as romance. Like the way there's love everywhere around me - there's love for my friends, there's love for my paintings, there's love for myself.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“I don’t want people to be worried about me. There’s nothing to worry about. I don’t want people to try and understand why I’m the way I am, because I should be the first person to understand that. And I don’t understand yet. I don’t want people to interfere. I don’t want people in my head, picking out this and that, permanently picking up the broken pieces of me.”
― Alice Oseman, Solitaire

“Sometimes i think if nobody spoke to me, i'd never speak again.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment