reychrach > reychrach's Quotes

“I wished I had always lived in this body, and you could have lived here with me, and I could have told you it's all right, it's going to be all right...

My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I am transformed but not yet, exactly. The transformation has begun-this pain, this excruciating pain, it is part of the process-and will not end until—well, I suppose I don't know when. Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be trans-forming, better and better until I die?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“She forced love into this loveless space, made it the subject of her life. She showed them that she, the Hurricane, was capable of great love, and that if they’d look they’d see they were too. And maybe someday they would understand what they’d enabled, what they’d created.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“A home is an origin story. A home is a thing to carry. A home is a wild field of energy that floods floods floods. Call me. Call me home.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“They were all humans, and yet they had completely different ideas about what humanity meant.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“She tried to breathe in the feeling of doing something good and right and difficult that no one could understand. She didn't wonder if she was right; she wondered why it was her destiny to do so many good, hard things.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“What she had learned was that life, any life, was death and rebirth, death and rebirth. Everything always changed.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“This was the time I thought there was nothing to lose. There is always, always a bottom you can't imagine. I didn't know that then.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“where life is precious, life is precious”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What were you before you met me?"
"I think I was drowning"
"And what are you now?"
"Water”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“They say nothing lasts forever and I’m writing you in the voice of an endangered species.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Maybe in the next life we'll meet each other for the first time- believing in everything but the harm we're capable of. Maybe we'll be the opposite of buffaloes. We'll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple.

Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they're wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.

Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field- it was always there- where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

As a rule, be more.

As a rule, I miss you.

As a rule,"little" is always smaller than "small". Don't ask me why.

I'm sorry I don't call enough.

Green Apple.

I'm sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Lonely, ain't it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula