Gwen > Gwen's Quotes

“Don't say Fili, sister. Say Pili. In Tagalog, pili means to choose. Pino means fine. Pilipino equals 'fine choice.”
― Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love: A Novel

“Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse - we can't remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices and they led me somewhere else, led me to someone else. And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn't end up with you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Maybe in Another Life

“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“. . . One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos. Someone who has got themselves into a catastrophic situation rarely retreats from it, we're far more inclined to carry on even faster. We've created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we're going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, the more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash."

. . . So Zara asked, without any sarcasm, "Have you learned any theories about why people behave like that, then?"

"Hundreds," The psychologist smiled.

"Which one do you believe?"

"I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“People who intentionally become famous - I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it - are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“I don't know how I can be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“But no one had ever been saved by memories, no one had been protected by words and pledges, and those loved greatly by others died too.”
― Marina Dyachenko, Vita Nostra

“May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“My father did not become the bad guy for me. Not yet. That day I hated my mother for killing my father, but also for all the reasons you cannot say. Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“I'd rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.
But I was wrong.
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.
- Florence Day”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“I began to realize that love wasn't dead, but it wasn't forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel