Gen > Gen's Quotes

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“People decide what you're like before they even get to know you”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“When a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her. She would always be able to say, Someone is coming. I am not alone.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“It’s too late. He’s already learned how not to drown.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“What will happen to us?" I asked. "There will always be us," he answered.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I thought of our time together, of how brief and bittersweet it was. I didn't tell you something important, then. I guess it's too late now, but it's something that occurred to me only after we parted ways. I thought--when I was with you, I was content to just sit back and enjoy the ride, as it were, because the ride was so pleasant. And maybe that was the problem.”
― Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak, Dear Distance

“Between the midnight and the morning: on a given day, that's the hardest stretch of time to fill.”
― Luis Joaquin M Katigbak

“There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“Silence is a protective coating over pain.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“Here I am frozen, when I deserve to burn.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.”
― Carol Ann Duffy

“I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Afterward I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I'm bettering myself, I thought. I'm going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You think everyone you like is special, she said. I'm just a normal person. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they're different from everyone else. You're doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“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

“Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life