Alexis > Alexis's Quotes

“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
― Tom Bodett

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
― Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“The heart that
breaks open can
contain the
whole universe.”
― Joanna Macy

“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

“Was life always like that? she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you wanted to be?”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and the Great World

“At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“If I give you a hint and tell you it's a hint, it will be information.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”
― Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone

“When you are young a year is a big part of your life and seems to last for ever. When you are old, there have been too many of them gone before and they pass all too fast. We move so slowly away from birth, and rush so quickly to death.”
― Peter May, The Lewis Man

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young."
"Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“She told me she met the love of her life,” Zohra says at last, still staring out the window. “You read poems about it, you hear stories about it, you hear Sicilians talk about being struck by lightning. We know there’s no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning. It’s what she always had with me. Isn’t it? But what if she’s right, Arthur? What if the Sicilians are right? That it’s this earth-shattering thing she felt? Something I’ve never felt. Have you?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, 'Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and i got you some while i was out', as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It's not a game you don't understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3 am. Or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It's fucking boring, dude. I don't walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store. No checking her emails or calling her job to make sure she's actually there. No sitting in my car outside her house at dawn, to make sure she's alone when she leaves. This feels safe, and steadfast, and predictable. And secure. It's boring as shit. And it's easily the best thing I've ever felt.”
― Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

“Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“And there was nothing left for me to do, but go.
Though the things of the world were strong with me still.
Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; toweling off one’s clinging shirt post–June rain.
Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth.
Someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world”
― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

“We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light,”
― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

“I want to see the story. More than anything, I am frustrated by the fact that I’ll never know how things turn out.”
― Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence