Greta Salas > Greta's Quotes

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“He looked down and did something quite out of character for him: he took hold of Shmuel's tiny hand in his and squeezed it tightly.
"You're my best friend, Shmuel," he said. "My best friend for life.”
― John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“Uno se hace hombre, se hace más humano, cuando tiene su propia biblioteca, aunque sea de un solo libro.”
― Benito Taibo, Persona normal

“El libro es jardín que se puede llevar en el bolsillo, nave espacial que viaja en la mochila, arma para enfrentar las mejores batallas y afrentar a los peores enemigos, semilla de libertad, pañuelo para las lágrimas. El libro es cama mullida y cama de clavos, el libro te obliga a pensar, a sonreír, a llorar, a enojarte ante lo injusto y aplaudir la venganza de los justos. El libro es comida, techo, asiento, ropa que me arropa, boca que besa mi boca. Lugar que contiene el universo.”
― Benito Taibo, Persona normal

“La gente le tiene muchísimo más miedo a las palabras que a los cañones. Las palabras han hecho revoluciones, puentes, caminos. Han logrado que la gente se enamore o se odie para siempre. Hay palabras grandes como monocotiledónea o gatroenterólogo y pequeñitas pero poderosas como paz. Importantes como justicia, imprescindibles como vida, valiosas como sueño, muy poco significativas como dinero... Lo importante es cómo se usan y qué se quiere decir cuando se usan.”
― Benito Taibo, Persona normal

“Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure.
If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it....
It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.
I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun.
We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took.
And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things.
They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums.
Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me.
If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.
Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.
So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?”

They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.

“Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.”

My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.

“See this shoe?” my father said.

Buckley nodded his head.

“I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?”

“Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.

“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.”

I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?

“This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when you mother plays, she likes the cannon.”

“Is that a dog?”

“Yes, that’s a Scottie.”

“Mine!”

“Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley’s small body on his knee-the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?”

“The shoe?” Buckley asked.

“Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.”

My brother concentrated very hard.

“Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.”

Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards.

“Let’s say the other pieces are our friends?”

“Like Nate?”

“Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?”

“They can’t play anymore?”

“Right.”

“Why?” Buckley asked.

He looked up at my father; my father flinched.

“Why?” my brother asked again.

My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is”. He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back.

“Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?”

Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.

My father nodded. "You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not really understand.

Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn up.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?

I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.
...
You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen