Leoni > Leoni's Quotes

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“We repeat what we don’t repair,”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.”
― Anthony Doerr

“She'd learned that the beginning of one's life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
― Daphne duMaurier, Rebecca

“I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that- to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“We're the oldest love triangle in the world: mother, father, child.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally.
It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The hardest-hearted woman isn't a murderer or rapist - she's a leaver of children.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“...feelings were always feelings, subjectively true one hundred percent of the time...”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse