serena > serena's Quotes

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Mark says that when I am frustrated his I love you means it's okay for me to be frustrated - a reminder that my feelings are situational and temporary. "And because I love you even when you are annoyed and I want you to know," he adds.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It's basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“It is difficult to translate a great love, a great life, into words on a page. It sounds so prosaic - raking leaves, smiling at each other in understanding - but it is in the everyday moments that the tenacity of love, and its depth, are often revealed.”
― Emilie Pine, Notes To Self

“Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating? I resented it. It was like good sea salt—just a tiny dash could really bring out the flavour of the date and it was so often delectable.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Nostalgia: Greek compound combining nostos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). The literal Greek translation for nostalgia is "pain from an old wound.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Plus, you don't go to Trader Joe's unless you're in it. It's grocery IKEA. Everybody knows that. You have to be prepared to fight. That's long relationship territory. Like, we're talking picking people up from the airport.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“It's that his house feels like a home in a way I've never experienced in New York. The pictures on the walls, the impractical number of books, the stupid avocado egg timer. It's festooned with personal effects. Nobody's leaving anytime soon. It feels like a place where people want to stay.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“Life is only bearable because time makes you forget everything. But life is worthwhile because love makes you remember everything.”
― Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land

“Now that I’m older I know that life is not about what keeps you safe, but what you keep safe, and that’s what matters the most.”
― Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land

“The air in Seoul smells of rain, cooking oil, garbage, pine trees, persimmon, perfume, red bean paste, hot metal, and snow. It changes by the season and the time of day and the neighborhood.”
― Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land

“If only I could I would pluck off the stars from the night sky and toss them all into her garden and that wouldn't even be enough.”
― Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land

“For the first time in my life, I'm nervously happy. Usually I'm neither nervous nor happy because I have no expectations about anything. Now I have something I want and suddenly all my decisions matter more.”
― Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land

“There’s that Poppy, who’s experiencing it all and having the most magical night of her life. And then there’s the one who’s already missing it, who’s watching this all happen from some point in the distance, knowing I can never go back and do it all over again.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“It’s possible that all those little moments that meant so much to me never meant quite the same thing to him. It’s possible that he didn’t reach out to me for two full years because, when we stopped speaking, he didn’t lose something precious the way that I did.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“I want him to remember. I want every moment to matter as much to him as it has to me.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“It hurts to want it all, so many things that can't coexist within the same life.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“But most of us are too scared to even ask what we want, in case we can't have it.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“It was so late it was almost morning, those slippery hours when it feels safest to let your secrets out.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“Facebook was like a constant high school reunion, with everyone catching up their acquaintances on the life milestones that had happened since they’d last talked. Instagram was like a constant first date, with everyone putting the best version of their lives on display.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Harold sighs. “Jude,” he says, “there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“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

“Bad things don't dig down through your life until the pit's so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again. No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read