Reah > Reah's Quotes

“That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“And I hid the complicated feelings that came with trying to memorize someone you loved, just in case.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“The cottage pie was about as wholesome and straightforward as you could get. It was food for winter evenings and happy days. And the salad was rich, complicated, a little bit sweet, and seemed to be trying way too hard to be impressive. We'd both served each other a metaphor.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“The sight of him stirred a wanting that was starting to feel familiar, though it was less frantic tonight. It was a warm, steady thing, like a heartbeat.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“This was another fossil of a joke. I couldn't remember where it'd come from, I had a horrible feeling it might have been me.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“When she started to cry, the upside was as it always was: the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with—it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry, Evvie had always thought. It was between you and the tile walls, and everything that hurt turned into water, and the water went away.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“Dean, people don't like...fragility. It makes them nervous. They're scared thinking things just happen. They think there's always something you can do to keep monsters from getting under the bed.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“All she could think as she finally, finally kissed him was finally, finally.”
― Linda Holmes, Evvie Drake Starts Over

“It was barely evening, but I crawled into bed. Depression-stupefied, weary and hopeless, I should have slept.
But I was strangely restless. Slightly tearful. And troubled by wayward thoughts.
Depression was thoughtless, tearless, an animal’s pain.
Some hours later, I realised.
I wasn’t depressed. I was sad.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“You know that bit in the Bible when they’re all like, ‘Yo Peter, do you know this Jesus bloke?’ and he’s like, ‘Hell, no.’ It was like that, but even worse.” “My word.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“I was the climber of a sheer cliff, dragging myself on bleeding hands towards a summit that I'd never reach and sometimes didn't want to reach. The things I cared about were the hooks I'd driven into the rock face. Depression snapped them, one by one, one by one. My only certainty was the fall.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“Your body isn't an ornament designed for other people's pleasure. It belongs to you alone. You're magnificent just as you are. Whether you lose weight or gain more, you'll still be magnificent. Have a cake if you want one."
Cassandra looked patently disbelieving. "You're saying if I gained another stone, or even two stones, on top of this, you'd still find me desirable?"
"God, yes," he said without hesitation. "Whatever size you are, I'll have a place for every curve."
She gave him an arrested stare, as if he'd spoken in a foreign language and she was trying to translate.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Chasing Cassandra

“Do you think it could be loneliness?” he suggested. “No, it’s not that.” Severin looked pensive. “What do you call it when everything seems boring and pointless, and even the people you know well are like strangers?” “Loneliness,” Devon said flatly. “Damn it. That makes six.” “Six what?” Devon asked in bewilderment. “Feelings. I’ve never had more than five feelings, and they’re hard enough to manage as it is. I’ll be damned if I’ll add another.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Chasing Cassandra

“Are you grumpy in the morning?"
"No, but I wake up on the go. I don't like to linger over breakfast."
"You must not be doing it right. Lingering is lovely. I do it all the time." She stretched her arms and shoulders, and arched her sore upper back, her breast lifting with the motion.
Tom stared at her, mesmerized. "I might stay just to watch you linger.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Chasing Cassandra

“She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. ”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America: Stories

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“You'll find another.'
God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“We heard about people who go back to their roots. That is good, but don't get stuck in the root. There is the branch, the leaf, the flower - all reaching toward the immense sky. We are many things. In Israel looking for my "roots", I realized that while I was a Jew, I was also an American, a feminist, a writer, a Buddhist. We are products of the modern era - it is our richness and our dilemma. We are not one thing. Our roots are becoming harder to dig out. Yet they are important and the ones most easy to avoid because there is often pain embedded there - that's why we left in the first place.

When I first moved to Minnesota, Jim White, a very fine poet, said to me, "Whatever you do, don't become a regional writer." Don't get caught in the trap of becoming provincial. While you write about the cows in Iowa, how they stand and bend to chew, feel compassion simultaneously for the cows in Russia, in Czechoslovakia, for their eventual death and for their flanks cooked and served in stews, in bowls and on plates, to feed people on both sides of the earth. Go into your region, but don't stop there. Let it pique your curiosity to examine and look closely at more of the world.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

“It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?"

My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.

It's almost three in the afternoon."

I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves.
All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath