Emma > Emma's Quotes

“I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Peace of mind is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”
― Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char

“The only real escape from hell is to conquer it.”
― Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char

“I have discovered my true function in life: I am a snob.”
― Vita Sackville-West, Love Letters: Vita and Virginia

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”
― 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

“She was like milk - too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“Even ashes are a part of your freedom.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“Words, hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fashions them to fashions of its own.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“Surrender, Homo sapiens! You are no longer the king of nature! You’ve been dethroned! No, you don’t have to die instantly, nobody will insist on that. Crawl on a little more in agony, choking on your own excrement... But know this, Homo sapiens: you are obsolete!”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“You may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.”
― Martha Wells, All Systems Red

“But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,’ he said, ‘and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn’t that how it might be, trying to learn Josie’s heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn’t there always be others you’d not yet entered?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“One of them says, 'Why did they do it?'
And the other answers, 'Because they could.'
That is the only answer there ever is.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbour the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?

"I don't know," Connor shrugged, exhausted. "Your stories never made any sense to me."

The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Stories don't always have happy endings."

This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“I did not come to heal her, the monster said. I came to heal you.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet