Jeroen > Jeroen's Quotes

“Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a word lost forever.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“These aren't the days to pretend you're only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We're more than this.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“Aster opens the gate just as Kidane did hours ago, then climbs on the mare, kicks it haunches, and gallops down the worn path that blooms into countless destinations.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“She moved in cadenzas of golden light. She floated on the wind of a royal serenity.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“Girls die from many causes: childbirth, illness, disease, men.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction.”
― Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King

“He hadn't remotely imagined that one morning he'd check his text messages and find love to have been lost, with approximately the degree of remorse one would feel over the loss of a pair of sunglasses.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

“God save us from people who think they're smarter than they actually are.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

“Women are kind of screwed, in the world,” Andrew says.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

“She doesn't really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marvelling at her.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

“It's hardly ever the destination we've been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing. Where did we - the species, that is - pick up that strange and perverse habit?”
― Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

“People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

“I want to disappear," I said. "Really. I want the ground to swallow me up."
"No." He swallowed a mouthful of cracker. "You don't. You want people to wonder where you went.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“She had trouble with that word, girl, but woman didn't feel quite right, either, applied to herself. Being a woman seemed to suggest a person who owned baking pans and a string of pearls.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“No, she thinks, oblivion must be pure, and their presence mars the purity of this place. They are the speck of imperfection that proves life.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Maybe I was looking for the answer to what I should be looking for.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Having tethered her to him, hooded her like a tame falcon, he could still cut her loose, release her. If she stayed, he still might let her go.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“I went about the market confused by many voices that could have been Mum's, many faces that could have been hers, and I saw that her tiredness and sacrifice were not hers alone but were suffered by all women, all women of the marketplace.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“In her experience, proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“When you are truly afraid, you experience an urgent desire to split from your body. You want to remove yourself from the thing that will experience pain and horror, but you are that thing. You are aboard a sinking ship, and you are the ship itself.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it's not a failing unique to the departed.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“We could hear her voice, speaking of a perplexing era to come, sounding from the distance. Her voice quivered on the night air, confusing her precise location. She could have been rattling the doors to our ears from a hundred different places in the living wound of our area.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“When the girl herself is absent, the room is like a blank page, almost no marks or clues to say anything about her, which perhaps does say something about her.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“Her sigh was full of despair, but at the bottom of her lungs, at the depth of her breath's expulsion, there was also hope, waiting like sleep at the end of even the most torrid day.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“A human figure approaching, filling itself in slowly, putting on age and sex and race, like items of clothing, till she's looking at a black boy, also thirteen years old, wearing ragged shorts and T-shirt, broken takkies on his feet.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise

“I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory. We're celebrated for marrying, but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“His footsteps sound hesitant, but he doesn’t turn back. Nor will the moment return, which is true of all moments, though not equally.”
― Damon Galgut, The Promise