Aya > Aya's Quotes

“Suddenly we’re not kids anymore, and it feels like it happened overnight, so fast I didn’t have time to notice, to let go of everything that used to matter so much, to see that the old wounds that once felt like gut-level lacerations have faded to small white scars, mixed in among the stretch marks and sunspots and little divots where time has grazed against my body.
I’ve put so much time and distance between myself and that lonely girl, and what does it matter? Here is a piece of my past, right in front of me, miles away from home. You can’t outrun yourself. Not your history, not your fears, not the parts of yourself you’re worried are wrong.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.”
― David Ellsworth from The Serenity of Selfism

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Don't be special." That's what I would say to my younger self if I could pinpoint the moment when I went astray. But there was no one moment. I was always astray”
― Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life

“What I’m trying to get at is, as bad as everything seems, I think, at its heart, life is good. It doesn’t throw anything at us that it knows we can’t handle—and, even if it takes its time, it turns everything right side up again.”
― Alexandra Bracken, In the Afterlight

“The only way we will survive is by being kind. The only way we can get by in this world is through the help we receive from others. No one can do it alone, no matter how great the machines are.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“I've got a stele we can use. Who wants to do me?"
"A regrettable choice of words," muttered Magnus.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“But I watch my brothers give their hearts away and I think, Don’t you know better? Hearts are breakable. And I think even when you heal, you’re never what you were before.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I am catastrophically in love with you.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“If you pretend to feel nothing, the pretence may become true. said Jem. That would be a pity.”
― Cassandra Clare, Son of the Dawn

“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Fear doesn't shut you down; it wakes you up”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”
― Aubrey de Grey

“It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.”
― Jenny Holzer

“Courage, however, is the best slayer—courage which attacks: which slays even death itself, for it says, 'Was that life? Well then! Once more!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma