Julia > Julia's Quotes

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“Don’t say his name. I don’t want him in here. I will cut him out.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“...have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“we are the ones we have been waiting for”
― Alice Walker

“Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“The soul is healed by being with children.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Another image comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse of Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can't know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy.”
― Harlan Coben, Hold Tight

“I think I deserve something beautiful.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“He liked cheap women, fast cars, late nights, and hard liquor, especially all together. In Jack's view, you are obliged to sin on Saturday night so you'd have something to atone for Sunday morning. Otherwise, you'd be putting the preacher out of business. ”
― Lisa Kleypas, Blue-Eyed Devil

“Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
― Kobayashi Issa, Poems

“Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
― Alice Walker

“What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.”
― Alice Walker

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.”
― Alice Walker

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“One day I will forgive you; until then there are scabs everywhere that you have touched me.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own. If I could walk into the house and say, "Froggy, I'm sorry I left." If I could hug him and unbutton his shirt and pick the petals from his hair. If I could do that, there would be no reason for me to fight this war.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper