B > B's Quotes

“A tiny pathetic thought: the warmth of Ayla's touch rivaled the afternoon sun.”
― Nina Varela, Iron Heart

“I am made of memories.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I have done it," she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.
"Go," she says. "He waits for you."

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“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

“Everyone was always becoming someone else.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I don't always have to understand the people I love.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“This is my problem. I want other people to tell me how they feel. But I'm not so sure I want to return the favor.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I want to meet you in every place I have loved.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I think I’d been looking for it all my life
a storm in my body to match the one in my head.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“...stories can make someone immortal as long as someone else is willing to listen.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“It wasn't that anger was inherently good or bad. It could lend power and drive and focus, but the longer it lived inside you unchecked, the more poisonous it became.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Lore

“It is acceptable, even preferable, to be alone,” Athena told her, “when those around you would hold you back or deceive you. The exceptional among mortals will always stand alone, for no one in the world was made for their task. Take confidence in that, and let it be a poison to your fear.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Lore

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“A drop of water gleamed on Ayla's lower lip. Strangely, it made Crier want to—drink.”
― Nina Varela, Crier's War

“If longing is madness, then none of us are sane.”
― Nina Varela, Crier's War

“I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I don’t think he was ashamed of anything those hands had done—proud of it, in fact—but all the same they were a problem, because they shaped other people’s perceptions of him in ways he couldn’t control.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women. They’re the warriors, with their helmets and armour, their swords and spears, and they don’t seem to see our battles—or they prefer not to. Perhaps if they realized we’re not the gentle creatures they take us for their own peace of mind would be disturbed?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“I’m under absolutely no obligation to make sense to you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo