Giulia Zzz > Giulia's Quotes

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet”
― Robert Browning

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”
― Danielle LaPorte

“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“When you are not being honest in a relationship – to another person or to yourself – it is a little like screwing on the top of a jam jar when the ridges are out of line. An onlooker might think you are screwing it on just fine, but you can feel a stiffness developing that warns you it’s not on properly, and you know then that, however hard you try to keep turning it, the lid will never tightly seal.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

“I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“This one choice didn't answer everything for her, not even close. How could it? Life was never a matter of one decision alone. Life was just a bunch of tiny steps, one after another, each a conclusion that lead to a dozen questions more.”
― Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

“should probably mention that I know—now—what kind of person communicates via hidden notes in a library book. It’s the same kind of person who dances in the dark: a person who doesn’t want to be seen. A person Just Like Me. But that’s the thing about dancing in the dark. It’s good that no one can see you, but you can’t see each other either. You can’t see what good company you’re in. All these people, hiding. Just Like You.”
― Tabitha Carvan, This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

“It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“I’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story