Olivia Smith > Olivia's Quotes

“Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.”
― Luis Valdez

“There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown-”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to 'make it home safe.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.”
― Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS

“How many thousands
of stories like yours
have been told
and forgotten how many
stories of lovingly durable nurses
of hospital sheets of IV tubes
dripping saline and morphine
How many stories of drugs
that would haul you
along in their wake for a while
but finally
let you sink”
― Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon

“[Nancy Reagan] and [Ronald Reagan] would’ve hated what was happening under their roof. While they were in the White House, they did their very best to ensure that people like me simply died. Their inaction in the face of the 1980s AIDS epidemic was nothing short of genocidal. It’s fitting that she’ll spend posterity draped in red, the color of blood, a color that has become the symbol of the disease she and her husband let run wild.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“Like other diseases that arouse feelings of shame, AIDS is often a secret, but not from the patient. A cancer diagnosis was frequently concealed from patients by their families; an AIDS diagnosis is at least as often concealed from their families by patients.”
― Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

“There are days when everything
feels like a metaphor
for your having died

There are days
when nothing does”
― Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon

“I often confuse
a sense of futility
with a call to action.”
― Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon

“That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.”
― Jessica Verdi, My Life After Now

“Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I cling to the Milan women's understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago--with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all "a disappointment." Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“...and I want you all to remember-that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of-something he can work and fight for."

Surely that gift-the gift of a world of human decency-is the one that all countries hunger for still. I hope that this story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible.”
― Lois Lowry, Number the Stars

“Once upon a time a castle stood here. That’s how it has to be said: Here it stood, and here it was swallowed up by the Danish revolution. And nothing is left of it. Hirschholm Castle was situated on an island. The castle was surrounded by water, it stood in the middle of a lake, and at night the water was covered with the sleeping birds she loved so much, especially when they slept wrapped in their dreams. It took half a century to build the castle, and it wasn’t actually completed until 1746. It was magnificent and beautiful, a Nordic Versailles, but the same thing happened to the castle as happens to very brief dreams: it lasted only one summer, the summer of 1771. After that the dream was over, and the castle stood alone and deserted and slowly sank into decay. It”
― Per Olov Enquist, The Royal Physician's Visit

“Are you happy here?" I said at last.
He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“I didn’t like dogs. Not because they scared me—they didn’t—but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people’s.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Some families are so sick, so twisted, the only way out is for someone to die.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go