Madeleine > Madeleine's Quotes

“The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible- that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“She's a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in it's focus. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what it's hue, can be deadly.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“We are all weak most of the time,' she said finally. 'Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.' She smiled at him. 'But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“For you, a thousand times over”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“When you wander in the dark too long, you start to see things that aren’t really there.”
― Keigo Higashino, Journey Under the Midnight Sun

“You know how the sun rises and sets at a certain time each day? In the same way, all of our lives have a day and night. But it's not set like it is with the sun. Some people walk forever in the sunlight, and some people have to walk through the darkest night their whole lives. When people talk about being afraid, what they're afraid of is that their sun will set. That the light they love will fade.”
― Keigo Higashino, Journey Under the Midnight Sun

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“But why should you be interested in me?"
Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this moment. But maybe – just maybe – if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Time is priceless, but it’s Free. You can't own it, you can use it. You can spend it. But you can't keep it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel