lia > lia's Quotes

“Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“what is stronger
than the human heart
which shatters over and over
and still lives”
― Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

“There is something of value in trying to put the world into words.”
― Ariel Levy

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young."
"Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“In fact I need you to know it was all true. The friendly guy who helps you move and assists senior citizens in the pool is the same guy who assaulted me. One person can be capable of both. Society often fails to wrap its head around the fact that these truths often coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That's the terrifying part.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“You can't hurry love, as the song goes. You can't hurry grief either.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won't hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happens, and to me it happens all the time (and more and more as I get older), the effect is so disheartening that I now open old favorites warily.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.”
― A.M. Homes

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“He has a theory: When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. “The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,” he says. “The key is to be present wherever you are right now.” This advice, more than any, stays with me.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“It is the certainty of never that hurts most. The knowledge that I will never eat star-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with her in the pediatric ward again. Never dance around her living room, headbanging our wigs to the beat. Never watch her paint a new masterpiece. I understand why people believe in the afterlife, why they soothe themselves with the faith that those who are no longer with us still exist elsewhere, eternally, in a celestial realm free of pain. As for me, all I know is that here on this earth, I cannot find my friend.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“The monotony of driving becomes meditative: The mind unwrinkles. As the usual anxieties and concerns vacate, daydreams flit in. Occasionally, a wisp of an idea appears out of nowhere only to recede, a shimmery mirage in a desert. Other times, an avalanche of memories tumbles forth, loosened by an old song on the radio or a déjà vu–inducing landscape. The interplay between geography and memory becomes a conversation. They spark and spur each other.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“We call those who have lost their spouses “widows” and children who have lost their parents “orphans,” but there is no word in the English language to describe a parent who loses a child. Your children are supposed to outlive you by many decades, to confront the burden of mortality only by way of your dying. To witness your child’s death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. Words simply collapse.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Losing somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed