Emma > Emma's Quotes

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses
of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Thoughts are clouds, Vicky. They are not you. The cloud of wanting to die appears, and if you don't grab it, it will eventually float away. The cloud that says I'm lazy and a coward and a phony to boot floats before you, and you can calmly watch it come and go. You are not the clouds or even the blue sky where clouds live. You are the sun behind them, giving light to all, and the sun is made up of goodness and kindness and life.”
― Francisco X. Stork, The Memory of Light

“Dear old world', she murmured, 'you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“I couldn’t quite believe how much I seriously loved Aled Last, even if it wasn’t in the ideal way that would make it socially acceptable for us to live together until we die.”
― Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

“I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“It's easy to convince men to love you, Puck. All you have to do is be a mountain they have to climb or a poem they don't understand.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races

“In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“I wish his darkness lived outside of him, because you have to know it's there to see it. Like all real monsters, he hides in plain sight.”
― Courtney Summers, Sadie

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Art is supposed to make you feel something, and I began to realize my appearance was my art. My body, my face, my scars told a story—my story. But I guess that’s how life works sometimes—noticing beauty only in retrospect and poetry, in silence.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“I'm learning that it's good to think about what scares you. To bring it into the light. Even to hold it in your hands, if you can, and feel how it can't hurt you anymore. To think of it and say, 'I am not afraid.”
― Nina LaCour, Watch Over Me

“Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried”
― Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country

“After all, once there was a girl named Lucy who loved her family, old and new.
It's not the type of love that ends.”
― Emery Lord, The Names They Gave Us

“I’m under absolutely no obligation to make sense to you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“If music stops, and art ceases, and beauty fades, what have we then?”
― Julie Berry, Lovely War

“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Heaven is a boy in a treehouse, with cold hands and a warm heart.”
― Kim Liggett, The Grace Year

“Be who you are, even if it kills you.

It will. Over and over again.
Even as you live.

Break my heart, why don't you?”
― Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise

“She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams.”
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

“We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe