Maddy > Maddy's Quotes

“Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities.”
― Miriam Allen de Ford

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“IN ONE OF his last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial

“I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me.

Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways.

Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts

“Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others.

I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I think we ought to live happily ever after.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“I'm going up to my room now, where I may die.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Now that I am dead, I know everything.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“Envoi

we had no voice
we had no name
we had no choice
we had one face
one face the same

we took the blame
it was no fair
but now w're here
we're all here too
the same as you

and now we follow
you, we find you
now, we call
to you to you
too wit too woo
too wit too woo
too woo

(The Maids sprout feathers, and fly away as owls.)”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “. . . you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but . . . I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“The sun is up, the skies are blue, and murder is in the air”
― Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club

“I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help