Hannah Kim > Hannah's Quotes

“All serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”
― Eudora Welty

“We are the breakers of our own hearts”
― Eudora Welty

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
― Eudora Welty

“Never think you've seen the last of anything.”
― Eudora Welty

“People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.”
― Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.”
― Eudora Welty

“Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going?”
― Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples

“Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.”
― Dodie Smith (Cassandra Mortmain, I Capture the Castle), I Capture the Castle

“...I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life, so I am curbing myself.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“I was wandering around as usual, in my unpleasantly populated sub-conscious...”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness. ”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Was I the only woman in the world who, at my age - and after a lifetime of quite rampant independence - still did not quite feel grown up?”
― Dodie Smith, The Town in Bloom

“There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one's mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor's house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor's leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them all.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”
― Shusaku Endo, Silence

“Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”
― Shūsaku Endō, Silence

“Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent...?”
― Shūsaku Endō, Silence

“The reason why darkness terrifying for us, he reflected, is that there remains in us the instinctive fear the primitive man had when there was as yet no light.”
― Shūsaku Endō, Silence

“What do I want to say? I myself do not quite understand. Only that today, when for the glory of God Mokichi and Ichizo moaned, suffered and died, I cannot bear the monotonous sound of the dark sea gnawing at the shore. Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God....the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.”
― Shūsaku Endō, Silence