Shveta > Shveta's Quotes

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What is a country but a life sentence?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It's not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let me begin again.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“tenderness depends on how little the world touches you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“But some nothing's changed everything after them.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Under the covers, we made friction of each other and fiction of everything else.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day-- neither good or bad, but something we passed through.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it a friendship, I said to myself.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because nothing could be taken from me, I thought, if I had already given it away.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The Fourth Sign of The Zodiac (Part 3) by Mary Oliver

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
Mary oliver”
― Mary Oliver

“Of course! the path to heaven
doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
-from The Swan”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's more than the beating of the single heart.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life - just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”
― Alain de Botton

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”
― Alain de Botton

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”
― Alain de Botton

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust