Lee-Ann > Lee-Ann's Quotes

“Who am I? Who am I?”
“You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs. You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen. You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way. You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it. You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again. You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”

"And who are you?"
"I'm Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Human life is like a sunbeam passing through a crack.”
― Lisa See, Lady Tan's Circle of Women

“Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see,” said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years. “That’s true,” she said. “But only because most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. They fear a change of the world order.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“She'd always been this way. Even as a child she'd reveled in being left alone. Her parents didn't understand her, and neither did her sister. Eventually they gave up on convincing her to join in, and let her be. She'd always been a satellite, orbiting out beyond the gravitational pull of family and community and togetherness. It was a peaceful way to exist”
― Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Light Pirate

“Leni was pretty sure that, to her, childhood would always smell like sea air and cigarette smoke and her mother’s rose-scented perfume.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Some people find the cravenness to lose entire years of their childhood. They tuck things into their subconscious so that it only eats them away a little at a time, in small, painless bites.”
― Blake Crouch, Desert Places

“Life turns on a dime.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“Later, going home, I realized they didn't look alike at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”
― Stephen King, Coffey's Hands

“These women haven't shared their genes, but they have given freely of their memories. Their ideas. Their skills. There is more than one kind of legacy.”
― Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Light Pirate

“I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.”
― Bryn Greenwood, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

“You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Why can't a girl be smart without it being explained away as a rare supernatural phenomenon?”
― Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds

“Men do things, and women apologize for them.”
― Amy Jo Burns, Mercury

“She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“We'd been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

“Life, oblivious to his grief, continued”
― Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.
I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“And now, finally, maybe I had arrived at denial. Maybe total denial. Maybe, in the absence of any certainty, we should just assume that we’re going to live a long time. Maybe that’s the only way forward.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“But there was something more true, more solid about loving someone through change.”
― Lisa Unger, Fragile

“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.”
― Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“In the end, what matters is this: I survived.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine