Anja > Anja's Quotes

“Half my life, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Action. The other half, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Cut.”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

“The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way your speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee -- everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

“You couldn’t go anywhere in this town without bumping into God.”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

“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

“The last thing that's needed is to judge your own heart, but then that's the first thing you go and do. A heart rushes to judge itself. A heart should have better things to do. A heart doesn't.”
― 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

“She doesn’t know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“Secrets are at times a necessary tool for peace.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“It's not that I'm unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it's that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“The past need not be so all-encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Even during the most dreadful, dramatic moments in life, appearances have their role to play.”
― Delphine de Vigan, Las gratitudes

“From now on, everyone would exist through the exponential multiplication of their own traces, in the form of images or comment. Traces, they would learn soon enough, that could not be erased. Accessible to all, the Internet and social media would quickly take over the television and multiply the range of possibilities. Live to be seen, or live vicariously.”
― Delphine de Vigan, Les Enfants sont rois

“The borders between private and public had disappeared long ago. This staging of the self, of one’s family, one’s everyday life, he pursuit of ‘likes’: this was not something Melanie had made up. It had all become a way of life, a way of being in the world. One third of the children who were born already had a digital life.”
― Delphine de Vigan, Les Enfants sont rois

“Her parents had got it wrong. They’d believed Big Brother would be incarnated in an outside power, authoritarian and totalitarian, against which they would have to take up arms. But Big Brother hadn’t needed to use force. Big Brother had been welcomed with open arms and a heart starving for likes, and everyone had agreed to become their own torturer. The borders of privvacy had moved. All it took was one click, one heart, one thumbs up, and you could display your children, your family, and the story of your life. Everyone had become the curator of their own exhibition, and that exhibition in turn had become an indispensable part of self-realization.”
― Delphine de Vigan, Les Enfants sont rois

“Whenever I paint the truth, no matter how strange, people see themselves in it.”
― Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters

“Our scars are what make us unique. Nothing broken is ever lost.”
― Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters

“The sun threw its last javelins of gold and the sky passed through violet to become a deep indigo.”
― Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters

“If only they could float up here with her and see the world as she was seeing it. Then they'd realize how small a sliver of the universe they occupied.”
― Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters

“To stare into the spiral of a shell was to see the swirl of a galaxy, the logarithmic spiral of life itself, the intertwined miracle of art and science.”
― Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters

“No matter the season, the sight of the dunes rolling into the ocean always awakened Abby's senses and filled her with awe for the cycle of life. She thought of how the horseshoe crabs emerged from Cape Cod Bay each spring to mate and deposit their eggs; how juvenile sea turtles knew to travel to these waters where crabs and jellyfish were plentiful; how monarch butterflies - each of which lived up to only six weeks - managed to transfer knowledge intergenerationally to complete their year-long migration to and from Mexico.”
― Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters

“Like everyone else, she got only one life. The one she was living right now. This life that could only have happened with every experience she'd ever had - that had landed her here, in this perfect moment.”
― Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library