A.Vesper > A.Vesper's Quotes

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“But I warn you, I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Sometimes, people never stood a chance in the beginning. Or they might have made a mistake. When people start saying things like she must be a bad mother because of that mistake." .... "It's not fair. People claim to know you through the things you've done and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”
― Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“But you can't feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.”
― Ransom Riggs, Hollow City

“I loved my friend
He went away from me
There's nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began-
I loved my friend.”
― Langston Hughes

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“They said nothing and our parents said nothing, so we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn't know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus, he was real nice."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer