Phoebe > Phoebe's Quotes

“Not every girl has a rape story. But almost every girl has an “I’m not sure, I didn’t like it, but I can’t quite call it rape” story.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“That the thing about death is that it’s terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when we’re confronted with death we can either be cowardly or we can be brave, but either way we’re going to die, so…
... And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live.
So you might as well be brave.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“He had this really amazing party trick where sometimes he could go a full hour without even once being suddenly reminded of the paralyzing truth that his life was finite and unrepeatable.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways pain is the opposite of language.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“The problem is, how do you have some kind of emotional catharsis when you know you’re too old for it? The trick, of course, is rejecting the poisonous, normative idea that there is a Too Old For Catharsis. Or, really, a Too Old For Anything. But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting normative ideas about gender.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Funny how it works with white kids though. It’s dope to be black until it’s hard to be black.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is never stop doing right.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Emira realized that Briar probably didn't know how to say good-bye because she never had to do it before. But whether she said good-bye or not, Briar was about to become a person who existed without Emira. She'd go to sleepovers with girls she met at school, and she'd have certain words that she'd always forget how to spell. She'd be a person who sometimes said things like, "Seriously?" or "That's so funny" and she'd ask a friend if this was her water or theirs. Briar would say good-bye in yearbook signatures and through heartbroken tears and through emails and over the phone. But she'd never say good-bye to Emira, which made it seem that Emira would never be completely free from her. For the rest of her life and for zero dollars an hour, Emira would always be Briar's sitter.”
― Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age

“Awards don’t matter—at least, I am told this constantly by the people who regularly win them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“I need to create. It is a physical urge, a craving, like breathing, like eating; when it’s going well, it’s better than sex, and when it’s not, I can’t take pleasure in anything else.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“A person can become invisible simply by staying quiet.”
― Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish

“If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“The most dangerous flaws are those which are good in moderation.”
― Rick Riordan, The Titan’s Curse

“I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don’t want to care that no one else cares because I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“The curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you’re not that you never arrive at what you are.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“I never thought I could be this happy,” she imagined one day saying to someone.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“The day you stop learning, my love, is the day you stop living.”
― Rachael Lucas , The State of Grace

“Nella’s colleagues at Wagner weren’t sociopaths. They all knew where one was and was not supposed to pee. But that didn’t make being around them any less stressful. Once you were in close quarters with them each day—once you’d spent more than a year making catatonic small talk around sputtering Keurigs and mottled bathroom sinks and Printer Row, grinning and bearing it while you learned about their new summer homes and their latest European vacations and wondered why you were still making fewer than twenty dollars an hour; once you got used to the fact that almost every time you came into contact with an unknown Black person in your place of work, this person was most likely going to ask you to sign for a package, or offer to fix your computer—it started to grate on you. So much so that, at least once a month, you got up from your desk, sauntered over to the ladies’ room, shut yourself in a stall, and asked yourself, Why am I still here?”
― Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

“Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“Eventually you can't help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“One day they had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage - that they had been letting her kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against music this whole time.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“But didn’t tyranny always feel like the hand of the way things were?”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower