Miranda Lynn > Miranda's Quotes

“... I think my sister Daphne's obsession with having children has a lot to do with wanting to erase the pain my mother caused. On one level, Daphne's approach makes more sense. Yet the thought of a redo is not only unappealing, but terrifying. I don't want that kind of power over anyone. I don't want to be something that someone has to overcome. After all, I think everyone would agree that it's far worse to be a fucked-up mother than it is to have one.”
― Emily Giffin, Baby Proof

“So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If I could,” he went on, “I would remain like this indefinitely—clasped by you, held inside you, a part of you—without moving at all. When we make love, I fight climax with everything I have. I don’t want to come; I do not want it to end. No matter how long I make it last, it isn’t nearly long enough. I am furious when I cannot hold back any longer. Why, Jess? If all I seek is the physical relief of natural lust, just as I would seek sleep or food, why would I deny myself?”

She turned her head and caught his mouth with hers, kissing him desperately.

“Tell me you understand,” he demanded, his lips moving beneath hers. “Tell me you feel it, too.”

“I feel you,” she breathed, as intoxicated by his ardency as she was by the finest claret. “You have become everything to me.”
― Sylvia Day, Seven Years to Sin

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Evelyn looked at Ann, the child she had always wanted, the friend she had once had, the lover she had never considered. Of course she wanted Ann. Pride, morality, and inexperience had kept her from admitting it frankly to herself from the first moment she had seen Ann.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“No relationship is without erotic feeling," Evelyn said. She had heard it somewhere at a cocktail party, an academic cocktail party. Someone else had added, as she added now, "But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be acted upon.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“...I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day's work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved." "What were we meant for then?" "To love the whole damned world.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“She made love to break love.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“…she stretched and yawned, a suggestion of desire informing all her nerves. Extraordinary…not that she should feel desire but that she should not have felt it, consciously, for years.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Evelyn wanted to be charming, provocative, desirable, attributes she had never aspired to before out of pride, perhaps, or fear of failure. Now they seemed most instinctive. She was finding, in the miracle of her particular fall, that she was, by nature, a woman. And what a lively thing it was to be, a woman.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“You loved the world for its own sake or not at all.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Both the bride and the groom have the privilege of at least fifteen minutes in which to contemplate what a sick, sick, fucking, Christ-awful thing getting married is. That's what the book says — or words to that effect.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author's intention or achievement.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“The desert frightens me, I think. It looks too much like the seventh circle of hell. I'm afraid of damnation."

"Why?"

"Why?" Evelyn repeated, peering at Ann from behind her hand. She lay back again and closed her eyes. "I don't know. I've always supposed everyone is."

"Well, they're not. I, for instance, am a hell of a lot more frightened of being saved." Evelyn chuckled.

"I'm serious," Ann protested. "Virtue smells to me of rotting vegetation. Here you burn or freeze. Either way it's clean."

"Sterile," Evelyn said and felt the word a laceration of her own flesh. "I wonder. It's fertility that's a dirty word for me."

"Is it?"

"Yes, I'm terrified of giving in, of justifying my own existence by means of simple reproduction. So many people do or try to. And there are the children, so unfulfilling after all. And they grow up to do nothing but reproduce children who will reproduce, everyone so busy reproducing that there's no time to produce anything. But it's such a temptation. It seems so natural — another dirty word for me. What's the point?"

"You'd have the human race die out?"

"No. We'll multiply in spite of ourselves always. We'll populate the desert. One day there will be little houses and docks all along this shore, signs of our salvation."

"What would you have us do instead?" Evelyn asked.

"Accept damnation," Ann said. "It has its power and its charm. And it's real."

"So we should all get jobs in gambling casinos."

"We all do," Ann said, her voice amused. "What do you think the University of California is? It's just a minor branch of the Establishment. The only difference is that it has to be subsidized."

"Are you talking nonsense on purpose?"

"No, I'm serious."

"You think nothing has any value?"

"No, I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day's work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved."

"What were we meant for then?"

"To love the whole damned world," Ann said…

"I live in the desert of the heart," Evelyn said quietly, "I can't love the whole damned world." 'Love me, Evelyn.' 'I do.”
― Jane Rule, Desert of the Heart

“Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean's surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms..."what language did the mermaid speak?" Alma wanted to know, imagining that it like almost have to be Greek. "English!" Henry said. "By God, plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy's distraction.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos-the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.

Nobody stopped her.

She was a comet.

She did not know that she was not flying.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“She followed the pleasure where it led. She had no weight, no name, no thoughts, no history. Then came a burst of phosphorescence, as though a firework had discharged behind her eyes, and it was over. She felt quiet and warm. For the first conscious moment of her life, her mind was free from wonder, free from worry, free from work or puzzlement. Then, from the middle of that marvelous furred stillness, a thought took shape, took hold, took over. I shall have to do this again.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Alma's existence at once felt bigger and much, much smaller — but a pleasant sort of smaller. The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature…She would probably die of old age before she understood even half of what was occurring in this one single boulder field. Well, huzzah to that! It meant that Alma had work stretched ahead of her for the rest of her life. She need not be idle. She need not be unhappy. Perhaps she need not even be lonely. She had a task.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“The whole sphere of air that surrounds us, Alma, is alive with invisible attractions — electric, magnetic, fiery and thoughtful. There is a universal sympathy all around us… When we cease all argument and debate — both internal and external — our true questions can be heard and answered…That is the gathering of magic.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Take me someplace where we can be silent together.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“It used to be that god was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“It's strange, isn't it, how the idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it's too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there's no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we're not ours anymore.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay

“Funny the only two times we use the phrase "seeing someone" are when we are referring to being in a a relationship or getting psychological help.”
― Deb Caletti, Stay