ella > ella's Quotes

“Nothing is as powerful as a woman who embraces herself, without apology.”
― MILCK, [Don't] Call Me Crazy

“I inhaled books like other people breathe oxygen. I didn't just read for knowledge or pleasure, I read to live.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“We all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“I was beginning to realize that all the food in the world, and all the running shoes, could not make me happy. The material things were worthless. I had lost my family. I wasn’t loved, I wasn’t free, and I wasn’t safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“There were so many desperate people on the streets crying for help that you had to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while you don't care anymore. And that is what hell is like.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“Along my journey I have seen the horrors that humans can inflict on one another, but I've also witnessed acts of tenderness and kindness and sacrifice in the worst imaginable circumstances. I know that it is possible to lose part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished, and that given the oxygen of freedom and the power of love, it can grow again.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“and I particularly loved biographies because they were about people who had to overcome obstacles or prejudices to get ahead. They made me think I could make it when nobody else believed in me, when even I didn’t believe in myself.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“I could not feel, smell, see, hear, or taste the world around me. If I had allowed myself to experience these things in all their intensity, I might have lost my mind. If I had allowed myself to cry, I might never have been able to stop. So I survived, but I never felt joy, never felt safe.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“But there was human intimacy and connection, something that is hard to find in the modern world I inhabit today.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“I couldn't imagine it was possible for something so beautiful to exist in the same world as me.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“Come to my grave someday, and tell me that the North and South are reunited.” It”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“as I began to write this book, I realized that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning.”
― Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

“You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special - which is fair, who doesn’t - but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“I thought that if i let anyone in, they’d find out what was broken about me. And then not only would they know, i’d know too.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“I don’t think you’re interested in having a nice life. Which is arrogant, really, because you expect other people to help you maintain an existence that you yourself can’t work up any enthusiasm over. Don’t take this personally, by the way. I’m just observing.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“he asked if I liked girls. I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don’t like you.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“At work I imagined nice things that might happen to me if I were a different person.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Sometimes i love you and sometimes i think it would be best if a plane flew into your office and you were on the plane or in the building”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Some mornings I didn’t leave the bed because then I’d have to brush my teeth, followed by a series of actions that amounted to living my life as the person I was. I was unable to drum up positivity about either dental hygiene or the rest of my day, so I told myself I was disgusting and lazy and I’d be late and they’d fire me, and then I got up. If you were really sick you couldn’t just harness your self-loathing like that, so I knew I was fine.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“During these outings I felt I had hitherto woefully misdirected my energies in attempting to cultivate a personality. If you didn’t have one then that left more room for everyone else’s.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Women in movies taught men how to feel things. They took men who felt nothing and made them feel something.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times