Bianca > Bianca's Quotes

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I had stood beside my father's light. I had held Aeëtes in my arms, and my bed was heaped with thick-wooled blankets woven by immortal hands. But it was not until that moment that I think I had ever been warm.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I think you should know,' he says. 'I like you. Like I shouldn't. That sort of like.”
― Beth O'Leary, The Switch

“You had every intention of being depressed forever, but as it turns out, there's work to be done, meals to eat, movies to see, errands to run. You meant to be in ruins permanently, your misery a monument, a gash across the cold hard earth, but honestly, who has the time for that? Instead, you survived - apparently, you both did - and things are shockingly okay.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories

“One night, you will wake with a start in this person's bed, you will discover yourself in this person's arms, and you will disentangle yourself for the hundredth time and dress yourself for the hundredth time and try to leave this person's apartment, but when you get to the door there will be a sticky note over the knob that says, 'but what if this time you stayed?”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“Yet I can tell you that there was a lonely and untenanted corner of my heart that I’d never known was there—and Frank moved right into it. Holding him in my heart made me feel like I belonged to love itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week, so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“This big ol' world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“When women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight. I found myself wishing he would wake so that I might watch the life return.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand, or the rise and fall of his shoulders as he pulled through the salt. It was enough.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Those seconds, half seconds, that the line of our gaze connected, were the only moment in my day that I felt anything at all. The sudden swoop of my stomach, the coursing anger. I was like a fish eyeing the hook.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“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

“I always loved everything about you, of course, but for some reason I always found your impatience especially charming. It was never because you wanted more, it was because you wanted everything.”
― Julia Quinn, To Sir Phillip, With Love

“Against the sky, the stars crown him, marking the edges of his silhouette like he is a constellation of himself.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“You know, when you come to think about it, it's a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“It had felt like the first deep breath I'd ever taken, to tell him everything, to hear his half of it all, then hold them up together to find they fit like two pieces of cracked pottery.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky

“When you are not with me, I am left with nothing but longing for you.”
― Julianne Donaldson, Edenbrooke

“He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now," she said to the other women in the closet.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Even the land of dreams needs to wake up sometimes.”
― Chloe Gong, These Violent Delights

“I think I love him for this loneliness, that it's what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I don't know then that one day I won't be seventeen. I don't know that youth doesn't last, that it's only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it's too late. It's finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don't listen. Their words roll over me but don't stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck's back. I'm an idiot. An easygoing idiot.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Today, when I meet children on this beach, when I see them running in the dunes, or lying on the hot stone wall that was once a levee, I remember that I was like them once, with their incredible lightness and insouciance, soaking in the sun. You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Why me?

He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it.

He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch for ever.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“He is full of roots, while she has only branches.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She was the kind of pretty that steals your breath, and the kind you can't really capture in a photo, because the magic is in the movement.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue