Julie Wang > Julie's Quotes

“For one does not have to be ignorant and poor to find that one’s life is barren as the dusty yards of one’s town”
― Eugenia Collier, Marigolds

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral's Kiss

“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men

“We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“See the world as it is, not as you wish it would be”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

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

“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. —VIRGINIA WOOLF”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine—that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Sitting across from me is my father, and as I look into his worn face it hits me, a truth so powerful I don’t know why I’ve never understood it before. The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good. I want to bellow, to weep into my father’s knees and promise never to do it again. But wolf that I am, I am still above lying, and anyway he would sniff the lie. We both know that if I ever again find Shawn on the highway, soaked in crimson, I will do exactly what I have just done. I am not sorry, merely ashamed.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“A statue isn't built from the ground up -- it's chiseled out of a block of marble -- and I often wonder if we aren't likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I'll be sitting on a train. I'll be lying awake in bed. I'll be watching a movie; I'll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I'll be struck with the paralyzing truth: It's not what we do that makes us who are. It's what we don't do that defines us.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It's a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you're anxious.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“After all, I absorb the world around me, and that’s changing all the time. Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love