Michelle > Michelle's Quotes

“Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“...An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand...”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one―it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus―and only the fungus―is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.
That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.
It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife

“To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife

“Nothing that’s worthwhile is ever easy. Remember that.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle

“No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally... Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.”
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...”
― Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“When you have children, you're obligated to live.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.”
― Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others