Marian > Marian's Quotes

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don’t love anyone.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realise now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“I think you're the opposite of insufferable, I suffer you gladly.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Avery had previously thought love was built on large, visible gestures, but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of ordinary, almost inconsequential, acts of daily devotion—washing the mugs left in the sink before bed, taking the time to run up or downstairs to kiss each other quickly before one left the house, cutting up an extra piece of fruit to share—acts easy to miss, but if ever gone, deeply missed.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“He was the only man in the house, but he
also was the house. They lived inside his moods.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“believe in nothing but a woman’s capacity to survive disappointment”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“You are not that important.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even just for a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high - no longer be a drug - and that was why you grew tired of them.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“How dare he not give a fuck? What a luxury, the luxury of a man. The luxury of someone who looked at the ravages of time and went, “Eh.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I knew I was cheating on my husband for the right reasons (having a lover makes me even more inaccessible and mysterious).”
― Maud Ventura, My Husband

“If we could identify our last times as easily as our first times, thousands of moments would be lived more intensely.”
― Maud Ventura, My Husband

“Imagine a place where I could scream and not be heard, and fail and not be seen. A place where my insignificance would not hurt, because everybody would be insignificant.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“I would drape my own soul over her body to protect her from eyes like mine.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?", my mother always asked me. "I don’t know", I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“I spent half my time loving her and the other half hiding how much I loved her.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo