Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“Don't tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon.”
― Paul Brandt

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“It's a curious, wanting thing.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“Optimism is a sliver of glass in your heart.”
― Karin Slaughter, Pretty Girls

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong

“My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“Dr. Ian Malcolm, "God creates dinosaurs, God destroys dinosaurs. God creates Man, man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs"
Dr. Ellie Sattler, "Dinosaurs eat man..... Woman inherits the earth”
― Jurassic Park

“Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“You said I killed you-haunt me, then! [...] Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“In the dream I don't tell anyone, you put your head in my lap.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I am so busy. I am practicing
my new hobby of watching me
become someone else. There is
so much violence in reconstruction.
Every minute is grisly, but I have
to participate. I am building
what I cannot break.”
― Jennifer Willoughby, Beautiful Zero: Poems

“How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room
where everyone finally gets what they want.
You said Tell me about your books, your visions made
of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is
the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you
there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar
cube…We were in the gold room where everyone
finally gets what they want, so I said What do you
want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”
― Richard Siken

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“I treat myself like I would my daughter. I brush her hair, wash her laundry, tuck her in goodnight. Most importantly, I feed her. I do not punish her. I do not berate her, leave tears staining her face. I do not leave her alone. I know she deserves more. I know I deserve more.”
― Michelle K.

“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”
― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.”
― Callista Buchen