Masha > Masha's Quotes

“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“When you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it's not.”
― Richard Kadrey, Aloha from Hell

“Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.” As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates, with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love, and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“Suffering feels religious if you do it right.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Oh, but you must travel through those woods again and again... said a shadow at the window... and you must be lucky to avoid the wolf every time...

But the wolf... the wolf only needs enough luck to find you once.”
― Emily Carroll, Through the Woods

“You said I killed you-haunt me, then! [...] Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“I burned so long so quiet you must have wondered
if I loved you back. I did, I did, I do.”
― Annelyse Gelman

“Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men can. Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic. Men, for some mysterious reason, find life more difficult than women do. (My mother believes this, despite the female bodies, trapped, diseased, disappearing, or abandoned, that litter her stories.) Men must be allowed to play in the sandbox of their choice, as happily as they can, without disturbance; otherwise they get cranky and won't eat their dinners. There are all kinds of things that men are simply not equipped to understand, so why expect it of them? Not everyone shares this believe about men; neverthetheless, it has its uses.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“My mother has few stories to tell about these times. What I remember from them is the odd look I would sometimes catch in her eyes. It struck me, for the first time in my life, that my mother might be afraid of me. I could not even reassure her, because I was only dimly aware of the nature of her distress, but there must have been something going on in me that was beyond her: at any time I might open my mouth and out would come a language she had never heard before. I had become a visitant from outer space, a time-traveller come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. (on the wall of a bedroom at a recovery house for alcoholics and drug addicts)”
― David Foster Wallace

“I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“This was always going to happen.
She's been dead since the beginning.”
― Aeschylus, Aeschylus: The Oresteia

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and it's the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Many have tried to kill us. All have failed.
-Valek”
― Maria V. Snyder, Magic Study

“Where there is light, there must be shadow, where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.... We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago-- from a time before good and evil even existed, when people's minds were still benighted.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“I am someone who did not die when I should have died.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“How much strength does it take to hurt a little girl? How much strength does it take for the girl to get over it? Which one of them do you think is stronger?”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
― Kait Rokowski

“I don’t want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers.”
― Ryan O'Connell

“You’re going to die in your best friend’s arms. And you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down, you’ve memorized it, it’s all you know. I say the phrases that keep it all going, and everybody plays along.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“In the month of December I couldn’t get out of bed. I kept waking up at 6 P.M. and it was Christmas or New Year’s and I had to start drinking & eating.”
― Eileen Myles, I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems