Jen Cusiter > Jen's Quotes

“I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”
― Bohumil Hrabal

“How wonderful, to walk half drunk with a Lemonsoda on a muggy night like this around the gleaming slate cobblestones of Rome with someone's arm around me.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I realized that hopeful feeling was just that: a feeling. and feelings keep you up at night, and they ake you feel sick when you're perfectly healthy, and they life. I didn't want to convince myself of a false truth just to feel okay.”
― Madisen Kuhn, Please Don't Go Before I Get Better

“how can you be true and
kind at the same
time?

how?”
― Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories

“I heard someone say somewhere that it's possible to write the sickness out of yourself. And who knows, maybe someone will benefit.”
― Anonymous, Diary of an Oxygen Thief

“They say the sea is actually black and that it merely reflects the blue sky above. So it was with me. I allowed you to admire yourself in my eyes. I provided a service. I listened and listened and listened. You stored yourself in me.”
― Anonymous, Diary of an Oxygen Thief

“They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that way.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories

“Surgeons are independent doers, ready to act. They prefer not to ask for help, thank you, or to place trust in much outside their own abilities. They work hard, expect perfection, and do not accept excuses. To the residents, some surgeon mentors were decent human beings; others were tyrants. Personalities aside, the central fact was this: Surgeons use their hard-earned physical skills to get results in the operating room (or create their own problems). They rely on themselves for success or failure. They are the captains of their ships. They do not need or want to rely on medication or another person to improve the quality of a patient’s life. Surgery is a specialty of instant gratification, for patient and surgeon alike.”
― Paul A. Ruggieri, Confessions of a Surgeon

“The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.”
― Marie Kondō, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

“I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he'd step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I'd been rehearsing for days now, Please, don't hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“What I have sought in love is a reprieve from the itch of consciousness -- to transcend myself and my human imperfections -- but this has yet to happen.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“You're alone, as I'm alone, and the cruelest thing is that finding each other and saying let us be alone together won't solve a thing.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I just...I just miss him. And I hate being so alone.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“By late afternoon I lie with my head in Peeta’s lap making a crown of flowers while he fiddles with my hair claiming he is practicing knots. After awhile his hands go still.
“What?” I ask.
“I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever,” he says.
Usually this sort of comment, the kind that hints his undying love for me, makes me feel guilty and awful. But I’m so relaxed and beyond worrying about a future I’ll never have, I just let the word slip out.
“Okay,” I say.
I can hear the smile in his voice. “Then you’ll allow it?”
“I’ll allow it.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“Shame isn't a strong enough word for what I feel.
"You could live a hundred lifetimes and not deserve him, you know," Haymitch says.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“In the face of scary things, knowledge was always a comfort to me. No matter what the subject was, if I could find a book or two about it, I could squash any anxiety that it might provoke. As my heroine Scully once said, “The answers are there, you just have to know where to look.”
― Abby Norman, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain

“Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and If I didn’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects, more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“No one was my master— but I might be master of everything, if I wished. If I dared.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“And I wondered if love was too weak a word for what he felt, what he’d done for me. For what I felt for him.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“The truth is, no man is my savior, my Jesus, my Buddha, or my mama. He is just a man.”
― Brandy Engler, The Men on My Couch: True Stories of Sex, Love and Psychotherapy

“Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“The meek may inherit the earth, but at the moment it belongs to the conceited. Like me.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“I've heard the word 'fear'. I simply choose to believe it doesn't apply to me.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes