Emma Dgrnd > Emma's Quotes

“It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“We buy balloons, we let them go.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
― Albert Einstein

“...needing people and caring about them were two very different things.”
― Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

“When you trip over love, it is easy to get up. But when you fall in love, it is impossible to stand again.”
― Albert Einstein

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“There's no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“I didn't like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“She wasn't bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just takes time. ”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“Don't look to the approval of others for your mental stability”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let's not worry.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”
― Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
If not this way, how? If not now, when?”
― Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?