Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“Tell me what you like, what you want to do.”
“I like having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like watching the rain through a big plate-glass window.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“What about what you want to do in the future?”
“Oh, that? … I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“The absurdity of the conclusion made him feel helpless. The strangers who stole his childhood with their sorcerer and beliefs, the despondent life he had lived on the brink of death, it had all been meaningless in the end. Mourning his years of suffering and despair, he stood there in the ruins of the village and wept.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It's a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either love or hate them, but that's not how people are.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“I could finally understand the horrific and cruel clarity of what he considered to be meaningful. The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“But there I remained, standing in the bathroom, waiting for someone to miraculously find me, to release me from my ties to this life.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Life is a series of problems. Especially when one is married and has a family. Because even when you manage to avoid the problems of the outside world and return home safely, your family is there waiting with a whole different set of problems of their own.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Capitalism is nothing before the forces of love and passion!”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Every person has only one childhood, and instead of being full of hopes or dreams, his had been crushed by the fight for survival. He never once imagined in all his years spent in the cave that a different childhood from the one that had been accorded to him might have been possible.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“You can't outrun sadness because sadness is already everywhere. Sadness isn't the visitor, you are.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“We cannot seem to escape the desire to feel productive with our time. I'm not sure if that's by choice or by trauma.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“The selfish part of all this is that I want to be important—I want to be so important that the world here falls apart, stops functioning, after I step out of it. And of course this doesn’t happen. But there’s a part of me that tells myself that if I were important, if I were truly important, my leaving would have had an impact. It would have done something. There would have been a hole that I left behind that people would notice. Instead, everything just keeps going on without me. And it feels like the lesson is, you don’t matter.
But of course any act of leaving creates that hole. Every act of moving is also an act of removing, leaving an empty space where what moved is no longer there. It’s just, the problem with leaving is that you’re never able to stick around to see what you’ve left behind.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“Even knowing that "most productive" should not be the goal of my years to begin with, I have still learned to be more comfortable with being isolated than with being unproductive.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“Taking the time to be around nature is helping me understand that things can just exist, being what they are, and it's just each of us that gives them some sort of meaning.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“Sometimes, when something falls away naturally, it forms roots of its own.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“Home, then, I suppose, is simply in the ways you take a strange space and make it feel familiar. Sometimes that means putting your stuff in it. Sometimes that just means putting yourself in it and giving it time.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“Having a deadline looming is almost a peaceful thing because it feels as if the deadline simplifies all the variables of living. It forces everything not deadline-related to blur out of focus.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“Writing is a lonely act that summons all the people who have shaped you. You conjure them up to sit with you as you write so they can inform and shape your work. Writing is, then, to surround yourself with ghosts”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“I always worry that pruning these leaves will make the plant look empty, bare, noticeably missing something, and that it will leave the plant looking more unhealthy than it does with the dying leaves still attached. But as soon as you remove those leaves, all you see is what remains, which is a plant with green leaves, alive, and you forget about all the other leaves that were attached to it before.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“It feels like there is no way to understand the passage of time once you are inside [a dim sum place], as the food keeps refilling and the dirty plates keep being replaced with clean ones and the empty steamers and dishes in the center of your table get replaced with full ones, and the ladies with the carts seem to always be giving out food but never running out of it, as all the proof of having eaten is constantly swept away to make room for what's next. It always feels like the meal is just beginning.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“During my visit, I tell my parents about this exciting new idea I came up with where I one day plan on taking a cutting from their jade plant and growing a new jade plant from it in my own apartment, so that something they took care of every day could beget something that I would take care of every day, which feels like a small and distant way for me to care for them by keeping a piece of their care alive.”
― Jonny Sun, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

“He once admitted he’d felt disappointed to discover that I didn’t know how to make pickled radishes or grilled fish, and wouldn’t sweetly knot his neckties for him like I did when I was working. I’d told him I wasn’t looking for a man who would be my rock in life. That was another shock to him.”
― Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples

“Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Everything's ruined, our lives around our lands are ruined, our water, the air, everything.

Their almighty dollar comes first. That's pretty sad. You can't eat money.

At the cost of our lives-as long as they get their money. They don't care how many of us they kill off.”
― Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

“...[S]he wanted me to talk about all the harassment and how shitty it all is and how the men are awful. It felt tabloid-y.

...

I just felt like her story wasn't my story. It was already written before she called.

She had already made up her mind and wanted me to corroborate. But I...

I don't think people like her believe that the men they know wouldn't be any different.

They don't think that the loneliness and homesickness and boredom and lack of women around would affect their brother or dad or husband the same way-

I mean, why would they? They don't think about it at all. They never have to.”
― Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

“A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.”
― Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“The individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community—or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the care of the community’s welfare.”
― Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”
― Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People