May Be > May's Quotes

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

“I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“From the way she (or he) holds up the lantern and peers at whatever is ahead, one gets the sense of a huge darkness surrounding her; above all I get the sense that she is alone, perhaps by choice or perhaps because no one else was courageous enough to follow her into the darkness.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“We all want to be in the room where it happens, we want to be part of the things that matter to us, but no two people have the exact same collection of things that matter. Nowadays, I don't so much want to be in the room where it happens, but I do really want to help other people choose the right rooms, and help them realize that they really are a part of things that matter. Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that's when we're really lost.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“It’s a library, Daphne. If you can’t be a human here, where can you?”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“Außerdem war mir, als hätte ich was wichtiges verloren. Mein altes Selbst. Mich, vor all dem Schlechten. Und ich wusste nicht mal wann es passierte war und wie es zu mir zurück kehren konnte.”
― Mikita Franko, Дни нашей жизни

“But somehow her satisfaction never lasted very long. She always found herself changing, pushing against the limits and ruining things for everyone around her.

"It's not always my fault," she said softly. "Things just get complicated, sometimes.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Specials

“Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“This is my problem. I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture I bc my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.

You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t I say those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said. “And everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave.”
― Stephen King, Revival

“Sometimes I’m afraid to love other people.

Everyone I care about eventually leaves me, whether it’s death, or war or simply because they don’t want me. They go places I can’t find, places I can’t reach. And I’m not afraid to be alone, but I’m tired of being the one left behind. I’m tired of having to rearrange my life after the people within it depart, as if I’m a puzzle and I’m now missing pieces and I will never feel that pure sense of completion again.”
― Rebecca Ross, Divine Rivals

“A part of me is just waiting for the moment you see whatever it is that drives people away. And I don't want that. I don't want you to stop wanting me around. I think it might break my heart to be someone you don't like.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“When you find that rare person who really knows who you are and they still don't love you... I was burning.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“But remember that good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Don’t aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Du kennst doch bestimmt den Spruch, dass Gott die Menschen nach seinem Ebenbild erschaffen hat. Guck dich mal um! Wenn man davon ausgeht, dass Gott ein Arschloch ist, ergibt das plötzlich mächtig viel Sinn.”
― Marc-Uwe Kling, Die Känguru-Chroniken

“His face was all sharp angles, thin and pointed, like something Pythagoras had doodled on the corner of his scroll before getting on with his theorem.”
― Philip Kerr, A Quiet Flame

“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“I want to push as hard as possible against all the bruises in my heart, until it changes me. Until I learn to stop fucking everything up.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“I'm saying that when you really love someone, sometimes the things they need may hurt you, and some people are worth hurting for.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six