Patricia > Patricia's Quotes

“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled - not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did.”
― Leigh Bardugo, The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic

“Depression isn't a war you win. It's a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It's one bloody fray after another.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“I was diamond on the outside, and I would not break.
Inside, though, I was already broken.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“Grief is an ocean, and guilt the undertow that pulls me beneath the waves and drowns me.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“How ugly we must look to them, spilling light into every dark corner to push back the shadows, blinding ourselves to the true beauty of emptiness.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“The problem with oceans? They always seem smaller from the shore.”
― Joan He, The Ones We're Meant to Find

“Alone is an island. It’s an uncrossable sea, being too far from another soul, whereas lonely is being too close, in the same house yet separated by walls because we choose to be, and when I fall asleep, the pain of loneliness follows me as I dream of more walls.”
― Joan He, The Ones We're Meant to Find

“Because it was possible to love someone without fully understanding them. Possible to love parts of them, and not their whole.”
― Joan He, The Ones We're Meant to Find

“And I think we have even less choice over the ones we’re meant to find.”
― Joan He, The Ones We're Meant to Find

“Logic ended where love began.”
― Joan He, The Ones We're Meant to Find

“We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live.
The universe may forget us, but it doesn't matter. Because we are the ants, and we'll keep marching on.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“I saw the world from the stars' point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love's only demand is that we fall.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“That's the problem with memories: you can visit them, but you can't live in them.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“Your entire sense of self-worth is predicated upon your belief that you matter, that you matter to the universe. But you don't. Because we are the ants.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“Because you can only die once but you can suffer forever.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“People don’t really change; they just find something else to give their life meaning.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“As human beings, we seek meaning in everything. We're so good at discovering patterns that we see them where they don't exist.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“There's an amazing world out there for you to discover, Henry Denton, but you have to be willing to discover yourself first.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“You spend your life hoarding memories against the day you'll lack the energy to go out and make new ones, because that's the comfort of the old age. The ability to look back at your life and know that you left your mark on the world. But I'm losing my memories, it's like someone's broken into my piggy bank and is robbing me one penny at a time. It's happening so slowly, I can hardly tell what's missing.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“He didn’t kill himself because of a single overwhelming problem; he died from a thousand tiny wounds.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“That's the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people's.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?"

"No."

"You're never more important that you are then.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“God doesn't protect people from knives, sweetheart. That's why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you're always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you're forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don't take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it's as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren't hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People