Mackenzie Soto > Mackenzie's Quotes

“I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I've lost the option of dying. The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I had to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek. My children have given me the exclusive power to blow on a wound to make the pain disappear, to understand words unpronounced, to possess the universal truth, to be a fairy. A fairy smitten with the way they smell.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I hadn't ever thought that a man could love me in the same way that my friends love me; that I could love a man with the same commitment and care with which I love them. Maybe all this time I had been in a great marriage without even realising.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I was grateful for understanding in that moment that life can really be as simple as just breathing in and out. And I was thankful to know what it was to love the person walking next to me as much as I did. So deeply, so furiously. So impossibly.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Even strength must bow to wisdom sometimes.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“I like to see you. When you’re not trying to be someone else.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“I’d give everyone the me they wanted, needed, craved, and in exchange they’d care about me.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“I find that people like me better if they don’t have to expend emotional energy on me.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person's hope. Leave it with me and I'll look after it for a while , if it feels too heavy for now.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“I hated lateness. Being late is a selfish habit adopted by boring people in search of a personality quirk who can't be bothered to take up an instrument”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.

But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room and trapped you in it without them.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“It was a reminder of what a human self was, and what a human life was: not a beautiful glass lamp just this side of being broken, or a lovely gold ring with a single dent in it. But a bettered old seashell, formed over millions of years, made to endure.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”
― GLADWELL MALCOM, Outliers: The Story of Success