Abigail Allison > Abigail's Quotes

“What does a sunset have to do with you and me? The sun sets everyday over like parking lots and oil fields and prisons and shit.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt

“They stopped at a Subway attached to a gas station. When he placed his order for a foot-long meatball marinara with extra cheese and no vegetables, he wondered if the sandwich artist could tell that his mom had died.”
― J. Ryan Stradal, Kitchens of the Great Midwest

“A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“It's amazing that the city we live in allows "pets" that belong in a sideshow, but makes it illegal for me to have a switchblade.”
― Helen Ellis

“No, I'm fine,' said Harry, wondering why he kept telling people this, and wondering whether he had ever been less fine.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Harry was just thinking that all he needed was for Dumbledore's pet bird to die while he was all alone in the office with it, when the bird burst into flames.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
― Epictetus

“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing!”
― Benjamin Franklin

“I have done that', says my memory. I cannot have done that—says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally—memory yields.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“He’d learned early on—fights in a marriage were like seesaws. You needed to balance blame carefully. You pile too much blame on one person, let them thunk down to the ground, they’re liable to stand and walk away, send you flying down on your ass.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“It's time you'll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real. The money is also real. Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“[Dessie's] shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman's world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves- smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that moulded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh. At Dessie's they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room