Vie > Vie's Quotes

“It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“You shall be my roots and
I will be your shade,
though the sun burns my leaves.

You shall quench my thirst and
I will feed you fruit,
though time takes my seed.

And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth
you will give me hope.

And my voice you will always hear.
And my hand you will always have.

For I will shelter you.
And I will comfort you.
And even when we are nothing left,
not even in death,
I will remember you.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I apologize for anything I might have done. I was not myself.”
“I apologize for shooting you in the leg.” said Lila. “I was myself entirely.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“At the end of each day, he used to ask me, “what have you done today to deserve your eyes?”
― Eric LaRocca, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“Queer folks are like wolves," Julian told him. "We travel in packs."

(p. 125)”
― Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys

“Many people must have told you that you are lucky to be alive. I think you would have been lucky had you not been shot in the first place.”
― Karin Slaughter, The Good Daughter

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“We perceive women suffering from mental illness with a sort of paradoxical double-sidedness; both victims and monsters, simultaneously infantilized and feared. A certain level of dysfunction is accepted—after all, women who are suffering mild depression and starving themselves aren’t going to leave their husbands or start revolutions, which is very practical indeed.”
― Camilla Sten, The Lost Village

“Recovered, in recovery, or struggling, we are still people. Sometimes that truth can feel like a fever dream.”
― Camilla Sten, The Lost Village

“That’s the lovely thing about books, isn’t it? You can take whatever you want from it.”
― Camilla Sten, The Lost Village

“Trauma is like a gift. The shittiest fucking gift in the world. Coal in your motherfucking stocking. But the minute you receive it, it becomes yours. And it’s your responsibility what you do with it. And you can use it as an excuse to destroy your life and destroy the lives of people around you, but you shouldn’t.”
― Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Yes, Daddy

“I’m not sure,” Callie said. “As you know, cats choose not to talk because they’re afraid we’ll make them pay taxes.”
― Karin Slaughter, False Witness

“People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“she had a gentle soul wrapped in razor wire, but the sharp edges are not her fault. The world trained her to violence, to ferocity, because it hates so much of what she is.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Screw you, Hilo,” she snapped. “I can kill my ex-boyfriends myself.”
― Fonda Lee, Jade City

“The Horn placed his hands on her shoulders, and pulled her close, and laid his cheek against hers. "Heaven help me, Shae," he whispered into her ear. "I'm going to kill them all.”
― Fonda Lee, Jade City

“The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master.
On my honor, my life, and my jade.”
― Fonda Lee, Jade City

“By the power of Phil Collins, I rebuke you!” she said. “By the power of Phil Collins, who knows that you coming back to me is against all odds, in his name I command you to leave this servant of Genesis alone...
By the power of The Thorn Birds - she cried - by the sacred strength of My Sweet Audrina and Forever...
By the power of lost retainers and Jamaica and bad cornrows and fireflies and Madonna, by all these things I rebuke you”
― Grady Hendrix

“You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night's fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of depts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“You could have kissed me or slit my throat and either would have made as much sense.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“What they say: call me. What they mean: it’s your responsibility to let me know when I have to care.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“I had no story to follow. My favorite character was gone.”
― Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us

“What does a monster look like? Jam asked.

Her mother focused on her, cupping her cheek in a chalky hand. "Monsters don't look like anything, doux-doux. That's the whole point. That's the whole problem.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Pet

“Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“do I have to snap the wine bottle inside him to get him to stop sending me sad emails? Do I have to cut his nipple off for him to realise he should probably ring the police? Do I have to cave his head in with my camera, rather than hit him the once? Do I have to crash his car? Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“You must have wished a million times to be normal.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’ve wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I’ve wished for a fish’s tail instead of legs. I’ve wished to be more special.”
“Not normal?”
“Never.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, "Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right." The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting lollipop or a toy bear'd worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skull for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories. And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Penpal