kate > kate's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
― Anaïs Nin

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me. ”
― Anaïs Nin

“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”
― Anaïs Nin

“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.”
― Anaïs Nin

“In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.”
― Anaïs Nin, House of Incest

“She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in. The only creature in this vast, cruel land who could kill him. And sometimes, in his loveliest dreams, he imagines she does.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“You humans always think you’re destined for things, for tragedy or for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”
― Homer

“Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“You, you insolent brazen bitch—you really dare to shake that monstrous spear in Father’s face?”
― Homer, The Iliad

“People who don't experience love are no less valid. You fear them simply because they are immune to powers that to the common person, are irresistible, and you fear the lack of power you have over them, for if love cannot stop them, what will? You do not hurt them because they are cold hearted and immoral, you hurt them because they have the potential to be and you are afraid of what they could do once they are.”
― Cassandrius

“I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh, like barbs. If I can hold so much love within me, and nevertheless continue to be uneasy, it’s because I need God to come. Come, before it’s too late. I’m in danger, as is everyone who’s alive.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't do or say the things he thinks.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don't get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers.
Those are the moments that make a life.
Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house.
The things that matter.
The things I can't stop longing for.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“Kissing him is so different now that I know him. Now I understand that the breezy, carefree Miles I first met is only his topmost layer, that his nonchalant way of moving through the world is a product of self-control, but beneath that surface, he wants.
The last bite of cheesecake.
The final sip of wine.
The bracing cool of the lake.
To be kissed.
To be held.
To be protected.
He wants it all, even the things he’d never let himself ask for, or won’t let himself have.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“Things go smoother if you don’t let people get a rise out of you,” he says. “If you give them control over how you feel, they’ll always use it.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“This is as close as I get to life on the edge: a milky tea and a near-white rug.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“But you—you make love so easy, Daphne. You make me think I already deserve it, exactly how I am.”
― Emily Henry, Funny Story

“Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed upon us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are . . . You walk around with the fundamental belief that the world is uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“But perhaps the most damning argument came from nature herself. Had David followed his own advice to look to nature for truth, he would have seen it. This dazzling, feathery, squawking, gurgling mound of counterevidence. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. There are crows that have better memories than us, chimps with better pattern-recognition skills, ants that rescue their wounded, and blood flukes with higher rates of monogamy. When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top. We don’t have the biggest brain or the best memory. We’re not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We’re not the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use tools, language. We don’t have the most copies of genes in circulation. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“Growing up," she told me, "is learning to stop believing people's words about you.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life