Corinne > Corinne's Quotes

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“In these moments I knew that if I could be smaller, smaller, less and less, if I could be tided, then he would love me fully and properly; and that anybody - oh everybody - would.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“For all her grumbling, she actually loves being a woman, pains and all. She just wishes she’d been born into a world that let those pains earn a little goddamn space.”
― Nat Cassidy, Mary: An Awakening of Terror

“In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die. And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where. we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy – that constant, roving hunger – you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart first with the sun.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“How many times had you said, "If I just had looked a little different, I'd be drowning in love?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“My memory has something to say about the way trauma has altered my body’s DNA, like an ancient virus.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Most types of abuse are completely legal”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“His face darkens with a mixture of embarrassment and anger- perhaps the most dangerous combination in a man.”
― Layne Fargo, They Never Learn

“Goddamn it, Frederika.”
― Carissa Orlando, The September House

“Didn’t you just tell me that people can change? You can change.”
I hadn’t the first clue what she was talking about. I changed all the time. I was flexible. I bent. I had changed little by little, steadily over the years, until by all accounts I was a person who should have been unrecognizable but to me was just who I was. I ought to have been a stranger to myself, but it didn’t bother me at all.”
― Carissa Orlando, The September House

“Hal was familiar with anger. He preferred it. It was like a warm blanket to him. Something soft, and smelling of home”
― Carissa Orlando, The September House

“Rage was only useful if you were allowed to do anything with it.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“Women are beautiful, alluring but terrifying forces and the way to deal with terrifying forces is to break them. ... He cannot bear a woman to have control over him and sees our sexuality as a threat, set out purposefully to destroy him which he must evade at all costs. In his failure to experience and take responsibility for his own sexuality, he seeks to nuke the woman yet simultaneously casts himself as the victim so the woman he is destroying still takes care of him as she is brought down. You collaborate in your own destruction.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I wanted to hold onto the house the way you'd hold onto a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in the world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn't.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“A grown woman is like a coyote--she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they'll die of sadness”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”
― Warsan Shire

“There’s nothing rebellious about loving something that can’t love you. You’re a woman, you should have known that men in the city would split you in half searching for their fathers in between your legs.”
― Warsan Shire

“By the time I’ve finished with you,
you won’t know whether you’ve been kissed or cut,
whether you were loved or butchered.
and either way you probably won’t care,
just grateful you came close enough to touch.”
― Warsan Shire

“- You know what really brings the storms, Geillis?
- What?
- A storm arrives at the exact second when a girl learns she'll never be free”
― Jenni Fagan, Hex

“Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know that love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles

“She felt so far away from who she’d been and with no easy way to explain who she was now.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles

“I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It's almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding. Smoothing her hair in my mind's eye.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles