rina > rina's Quotes

“Maybe home isn’t a place. Maybe it’s a person.”
― Abby Jimenez, Just for the Summer

“In a world where you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy,”
― Abby Jimenez, Just for the Summer

“You are not what happened to you. You are what you do next.”
― Abby Jimenez, Just for the Summer

“The best kind of love doesn’t happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life. It’s not grand gestures that show how you feel, it’s all the little secret things you do to make her life better that you never tell her about.”
― Abby Jimenez, Just for the Summer

“Death is only meaningless if it does not change us, Vis.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“Nervousness means there’s a fear to be faced ahead, Diago. The man who is never nervous, never does anything hard. The man who is never nervous, never grows.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“A fair system only works if there’s an unbiased means of assessing merit. When there is no pride or selfishness involved.” He gives a soft snort, shaking his head. “Which means that fair systems cannot exist where people are involved.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“The power to protect is the highest of responsibilities, Diago. When a man is given it, his duty is not only to the people he thinks are worthy.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“I loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organized in the exact right order, made you miss places you’ve never visited, and people you’ve never met.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Because the things that mattered most never really left. The love stays. The love always stays, and so do we.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Nothing is free. Nothing is safe. Magic is love, but also, it’s hate. It comes at a cost. You’re found, and you’re lost. Magic is love, but also, it’s hate.”
― Rachel Gillig, One Dark Window

“But he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me against his chest in a hug so deep it blotted out Market Day entirely. He held me, resting his cheek against the crown of my head, his heart drumming against my ear. I inhaled him, leather and smoke and cedar, settling into his arms like a rabbit in its warm, safe den. I had not fit into anyone’s arms like that since childhood. And even then, no one had ever held me so tightly—as if they needed me in their arms as much as I needed to be held. As if nothing else mattered but to hold one another. As if we had all the time in the world.”
― Rachel Gillig, One Dark Window

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Belief has very little to do with rationale. Why demand a map for uncharted territory?”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I was filled with happiness, so enormous and terrifying it was as if I'd committed a crime to get it. No one had given me permission to feel this way, and I think I might not be allowed it. He combed his fingers through my hair and I was frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way that anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“These stars were a temporary, beautiful gift of our era—the era that we all shared, a human era. I’d die one day, just like everyone else, so I had better try to live.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Sometimes, just under my tongue, I felt the exclamation marks I put into my speech, demarcating the sentences I didn’t mind being broken off from my agency, as long as I was assured I would be protected from the outcome.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I used to think every mixed-race person was an island, composed of a population of one. Maybe that’s because the Cambodian diaspora is so small here, or maybe it’s because I wanted, willfully, to be an exception.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn’t know what to do.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Time always leaves you one moment behind, and so you have to know them more, more and more, chasing them through time, at the limit where their life meets their future, and you need to have it, 360 degrees of what they see and feel and sense, or else your file is incomplete. Who did they love, before you? What hurt them the most? What will cause the most useful harm?”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.
But I was wrong.
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.
- Florence Day”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“There is no happy ending, theres just. . . happily living. As best you can.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“You don't ever lose the sadness, but you learn to love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And eventually, you'll pick yourself back up and you'll find that you're okay. That you're going to be okay. And eventually, it will be true.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“Love is a celebration,’ ” I read, my voice wobbling, “ ‘of life and death. It stays with you. It lingers, my darlings, long after I’m gone. Listen for me when the wind rushes through the trees. I love you.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics