Deanna > Deanna's Quotes

“There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to – we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version – it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.”
― A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven

“I tell you I'm tired of hearing it. There ain't nothing that happens to a person that ain't that person. The world out there only does what you tell it to do. The world is happening to you the way it is happening because you're telling yourself the story that way. If you want to change the world so damn bad, Ida, then where you got to start is how it is you're looking at it.”
― Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“Missing you is worse than Pittsburgh.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish [the book] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place

...

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“We’re just floating in space trying to figure out what it means to be human.”
― John Corey Whaley, Highly Illogical Behavior

“Awe.

It’s a feeling he misses. He made lists of things he wanted to feel when he was younger, big things, small things, ice, snow, the sand at the beach, someone else’s hands holding his, feeling him feeling them, a feedback loop of feelings, which is what happens when two people make love. He wanted to feel things that made him feel safe and scared and things that ripped his heart out of his chest, things that made him want to go home and things that made him want to travel, things that made him proud and things that made him regret his choices and he, like all people, slowly ticked these things off the list in his head as he lived, as the world turned until soon, there were very few things left to feel.

He believed the last thing he would feel, would be nothing, as that was nearly impossible to feel unless you were dead or hadn’t been born yet. He wondered what it’d be like to not be able to wonder.

He’d once wanted to know what it felt like to be able to talk to people properly, to be normal but he’d given up on finding that feeling, figuring no one ever really found it.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“I don’t deserve this. I have forgiven myself. What I did to you was not so bad. It happens.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am

“I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally.
It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death

“When you're a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“I have this compulsion for freedom,for a state of liberation. It is an urge so strong, so all-encompassing that it overwhelms everything else. I cannot stand my life as it is. I cannot stand to be here, in this town, in this school. I have to get away.I have to work and work so that I can leave and only then can I create a life that will be liveable for me.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“If, as a child, you are struck or hit, you will never forget that sense of your own powerlessness and vulnerability, of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, in the space of a breath. That sensibility will run in your veins, like an antibody. You learn fairly quickly to recognise the approach of these sudden acts against you: that particular pitch or vibration in the atmosphere. You develop antennae for violence and, in turn, you devise a repertoire of means to divert it.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“Sometimes she missed people before they even left her, got depressed about a vacation being over before it started.”
― Jennifer Close, Girls in White Dresses

“When a friendship ends, people don't always give it the same amount of thought that they do relationships ... most of the time, friendships end in a different way - slowly, and without declarations. Usually people don't really notice until a friend has been gone for a while and then they just say they grew apart, or their lives became too different.”
― Jennifer Close, The Hopefuls

“I just think you can't be so quick to be so sure of other people's situations. Examine your own situation. You also have a lot of choices. It's not always easier for other people. It doesn't work like that.”
― Jennifer Close, The Smart One

“She worried that maybe they'd been dating too long to end up together. It was like when you tried to jump off the high dive and if you did it right away, you were fine. But if you stood there looking down, thinking of all the bad things that could happen, you were doomed. You would just climb back down the ladder to the safety of the ground.”
― Jennifer Close, Girls in White Dresses

“Everyone just kind of leans their expectations of who you are on you and it makes you petrified of who you really might be.”
― Iain S. Thomas, How to Be Happy: Not a Self-Help Book. Seriously.

“The problem with the chemicals in my head is they lead to feelings in the rest of me.”
― Iain S. Thomas, How to be Happy: Not a Self-Help Book. Seriously

“You weren't supposed to spill out of the dedication page. But then you fucked everything.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“God, I am walking to the edge of a cliff. Build me a bridge. I need to get to the other side.”
― Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

“I can't reconcile the way that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible, the gorgeous and the tragic. Except that I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out. I see a middle aged woman in the waiting room of the cancer clinic, her arms wrapped around the frail frame of her son. She squeezes him tightly, oblivious to the way he looks down at her sheepishly. He laughs after a minute, a hostage to her impervious love. Joy persists somehow and I soak it in. The horror of cancer has made everything seem like it is painted in bright colors. I think the same thoughts again and again. Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”
― Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

“That's how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too - not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

“Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say