Amarachi > Amarachi's Quotes

“I do exist, don't I? It often feels as if I'm not here, that I'm a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I'd left off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“These are feminists who would say, in the words of former political prisoner Susan Saxe, “My feminism does not drive me into the arms of the state, but even further from it.”
― Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.”
― Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories

“Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
― Mark Twain

“Never try to outstubborn a cat.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“The straitjacket explained her passivity, her inability to defend herself, to take action, to make plans, to dream—”
― Jen Beagin, Big Swiss

“The plague doctor pivots, raises themself slightly on the arch of a heel as they lean in, their voice warm against the skin of my ear. There is a grin in their next words, a texturing of teeth bared, feral.

"How do you kill any religion? You convince its flock that their shepherds are wolves".

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"We find a Judas goat".”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“Man mistakes his own experiences as the canvas on which all truths are drawn.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“I do not belong to the era of writers who will be able to make any sense of this particularly turbulent chapter of American history; one cannot make a bed while still tangled in its sheets.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“I turned on the light, got up, and looked outside. The street under the streetlights. Even the street is just an idea: the impulse to go somewhere, away from those who have hurt you, or closer to those who love you.”
― Viola Di Grado, Blue Hunger

“When she has me in her teeth, naked and bad on top of me, everything is good”
― Viola Di Grado, Blue Hunger

“There were things I couldn’t say; I could only write them. Because when I spoke, I thought; and when I wrote, I felt.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“Life is not a zero‐sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“Never had the courage to win her, only ever the fear of losing her.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“To find your true self you need to question everything you encountered at birth. And lose some of it, too, because often it’s only in pain that we discover what really belongs to us . . . It’s in the breaches that we recognize ourselves.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“TRY THIS: DON’T stop beginning. Begin and begin and begin. Begin endlessly—that is, without the taint of even eventual ending. Don’t make the mistake of muddling into middle. Remain pristine and preliminary until the end is inconceivable: until beginning becomes being and being becomes enduring. Eternity isn’t just a demand of the market but also a demand of the heart.”
― Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What if, instead of being diagnosed—being called mentally ill—what if I had been able to receive care for its own sake. To be in distress, to ask for care, to receive it. What if there were space in this world for care.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen

“I may have said: it is the perfect escape, isn’t it? To lose your mind. To go mad. To fall apart, go crazy, all of it. To become a patient. To need help and to receive help. To be cared for. I would have added: the perfect escape becomes a trap. You learn this soon enough. You escape and then you begin to play the part, people respond to you that way, the role you are in. And there you are, trapped. It might become your life.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen

“We felt helpless, and yet this wasn't linked to the growing inequality and social isolation of the 1980s postwelfare state. The aggressive backlash to the gains of feminism and the civil rights movements of the sixties. We needed help and felt shame for asking. We had failed in some sense of an American individualist imperative. We had an obligation to recover. The narrative of progression. This was not only for the medical-pharmaceutical establishment which required our before and after stories, but also for a culture that locates mental illness in the self and not the society. If it doesn't quite work this way, there was no acknowledgment of that. There weren't stories of the ones who don't recover, or get better and worse over and over again.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen