Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“People decide what you're like before they even get to know you”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“He can guess, but he won't ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she'd never told him. Whether she thought he'd failed her, or whether she wanted him to let her go. This, more than anything, makes him feel that she is gone.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon and Other Stories

“I could wish for nothing more than to die for a childish dream in which I truly believed.”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man

“When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with your words: you tell people you're doing them a favor. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same. I don't know whose sin is greater - yours or mine.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

“I have no conscience at all -- least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“..he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

“As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man