Taryn Harbert > Taryn's Quotes

“You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good, no matter how much of a beating it takes.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“She was saying he wasn’t like the children in Christmasland. She was saying he was still himself. But Charlie Manx had said something different. Charlie Manx said blood didn’t come out of silk. Tabitha”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“The Naughty List - People who skim or outright skip acknowledgments pages. Please contact the management for your free, all-expenses-paid pass to Christmasland.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
― Blake Crouch, Birds of Prey

“Don't ask me silly questions
I won't play silly games
I'm just a simple choo choo train
And I'll always be the same.

I only want to race along
Beneath the bright blue sky
And be a happy choo choo train
Until the day I die.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog’s ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was best. That was one of the things she had taught the man whose last name she had taken for her own—that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on.”
― Stephen King, Lisey's Story

“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart. It’s a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don’t they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it’s so sad—”
― Stephen King, Lisey's Story

“You look up and now I see a part of you that’s new to me, a part that does want to be killed and I don’t think you’ve ever been loved the right way and you don’t say anything and I don’t say anything and we both know that you’re testing me, testing the world. You didn’t get off that stage tonight until the last person stopped clapping and you didn’t tie your shoelaces and you blamed the world when you tripped.”
― Caroline Kepnes, You

“The vast generosity of women is a mysterious tunnel, and nobody knows where it leads. The writing on the walls spells out trick questions, and as a man, you must know that you cannot reason your way out.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“There are so many things I would tell you if I thought that you would listen and so many more you would tell me if you believed I would understand.”
― Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage

“And the first time you come down to dinner, and your son is sitting at the dining room table wearing your hatred on his shoulders, who is going to be the first to tell him it is finally time to take it off?”
― Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage

“It does not matter how long we have been kept in cages. It does not matter how strong your gravity is. We were always meant to fly.”
― Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage: Poems

“You, with that heavy makeup case you lug around and the wild hair you attempt to tame and the vulnerability you fail to hide.”
― Greer Hendricks, An Anonymous Girl

“If Dodger were awake, she’d happily tell him exactly how much of her blood is on the floor. She’d look at the mess around them. She’d calculate the surface area and volume of the liquid as easily as taking a breath, and she’d turn it into a concrete number, something accurate to the quarter ounce. She’d think she was being comforting, even if the number she came up with meant “I’m leaving you.” Even if it meant “there is no coming back from this.” Even if it meant goodbye.”
― Seanan McGuire, Middlegame

“One was named Hephzibah, because her parents had a languid and eccentric way of looking at the world. They called her “Zib,” understanding that “Hephzibah” was more name than she had shadow. Every day they watched for signs that she was growing into her name, and every day they were disappointed. “Soon,” they promised each other. “Soon.”
― Seanan McGuire, Middlegame

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. —Mark Twain”
― Dean Koontz, Devoted

“She had created two living beings. Eventually, they would be people. Lavender hoped that the mystery of their futures held exactly this: gritty sand, goose-bumped arms, waves breaking over their freckled shoulders. She remembered the bedroom window in the farmhouse, that tease of a breeze. They had it now. If nothing else, Lavender had given them the gift of possibility. Her boys could touch it with their hands, the wide expanse of the world.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“The real villain is love: an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay. And it will forever go unpunished.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”
― Charles Bukowski

“Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Because the couple was in their forties (at the time, a gray-colored land, impossibly far and unimaginably grim), they were devoid of humor and in a constant state of yearning for their younger selves, back when life had actually seemed so full of promise and hope, back when they had been romantic, back when life itself had been a romance.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. —Virginia Woolf”
― Emily Wibberley, The Roughest Draft

“There was no question about what had happened. They were both shaken by the sudden realization that they did not belong in this place, that despite their affiliation with the Translation Institute and despite their gowns and pretensions, their bodies were not safe on the streets. They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud. And they never would say it out loud. It hurt too much to consider the truth. It was so much easier to pretend; to keep spinning the fantasy for as long as they could.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Birdie, I hate it in this country. I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion, because I’m becoming just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel