Annabella > Annabella's Quotes

“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“No!" Jimmy protested.”
― Ben Elton, Meltdown

“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

“What if suffering doesn’t end with death? How can we know? What if it doesn’t get better? What if death isn’t an escape? What if the maggots continue to feed and feed and feed and continue to be felt? This possibility scares me.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“It hurts, all of it, but we feel nothing.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“There is always another side, always.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“On dry days, Bobbi and I walked along underused paths, kicking leaves and talking about things like the idea of landscape painting. Bobbi thought the fetishization of untouched nature was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. "I like like houses better than fields," I observed. "They're more poetic, because they have people in them.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“At best they're very morally ambiguous.
Aren't we all? I said.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Conse­quently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“She passed weeks in bed, hours and hours, just playing the jewel game on her phone. The game was easy and beautiful and she felt she was very good at it. Every time she played, she would think "After this game, you will put down your phone and do something else." But she never put down her phone, and she never did something else. She continued to play the jewel game. She thought, "It's okay, don't worry. You won't play the jewel game forever." But, what if she did play the jewel game forever? She thought about her life as she arranged jewels upon jewels. She thought about her life very slowly. She felt her brain get slow, clear, and focused. Organizing jewels took care of the nervous part of her brain and replaced it with a pleasant sensation of having done a good job cleaning jewels. She felt like she was creating order in the universe as the jewels disappeared. As she was clearing away jewels, she wondered "Isn't it time yet to become part of the world?" What world? After all, the world was also right where she was living. Her bed was as much the world as anything outside it. The world included her phone, her bed, these jewels. The world included her doing this. How could she ever become more a part of it? So she cleaned away the jewels, assured there was nowhere she had to go.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“Mira knew that humans made art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing God likes. Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“You are sad because art, which is love, will be gone, but you only need art because you are stuck in the first draft. You are sad because your father had to die, but in the next draft you won’t be sad, because there won’t be fathers.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“At least God had given the sunrise—to those of us who lived on a cliff.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
― Cesare Pavese

“My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die.
It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you.
I always knew that, and I think you did too.

Because it is not a band-
it is an idea.”
― Gerard Way

“The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“I hold your life and do not take it.” They had begun as gestures of trust rather than of affection, but their meaning had grown. Now, depending on the circumstances, a simple lifting of the head—as she had lifted hers to receive his bite—could mean trust, affection, challenge, or contempt. It was, Tahneh thought bitterly, the perfect gesture for a betrayal.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Unexpected Stories

“The genitive is a case of relations between nouns. Often the genitive is defined as possession, as if the only way one noun could be with another were to own it, greedily. But in fact there is also the genitive of remembering, where one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her.”
― Selby Wynn Schwartz

“Have you forgotten that a poet lies down in the shade of the future? She is calling out, she is waiting. Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments. There is the hope of becoming in all our forms and genres. The future of Sappho shall be us.”
― Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho