Lucy > Lucy's Quotes

“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.”
― Louise Gluck, It Is Daylight

“That is what this city is. The party at the end of the world.”
― Chloe Gong, These Violent Delights

“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.”
― Paula Vogel

“God forbid the goyim think ladies who work the street are human beings! God forbid the goyim think that Jewish ladies love each other as human beings!”
― Paula Vogel, Indecent

“Let me wear the day
Well so when it reaches you
You will enjoy it.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“I cannot tell the truth about anything unless I confess being a student, growing and learning something new every day. The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“She smelled of home...as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“All up and down the street the houses looked like any others—but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Unhealthy love is two people stoking a shared fantasy of desperate beauty, weaponizing passion and desire.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time.”
― Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira

“Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“I stop myself from apologizing-because what would I even be sorry for? Existing too loud?”
― Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Ace of Spades

“I didn’t invent this twisted system that pits us against each other and makes us do crappy things for status—but I do know how to play it.”
― Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Ace of Spades

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago. My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. When some of Sugawara’s band members came into the store recently they all dressed and spoke just like her. After Mrs. Izumi came, Sasaki started sounding just like her when she said, “Good job, see you tomorrow!” Once a woman who had gotten on well with Mrs. Izumi at her previous store came to help out, and she dressed so much like Mrs. Izumi I almost mistook the two. And I probably infect others with the way I speak too. Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“For breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I’m often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner. I drink about half the bottle of water while I’m at work, then put it in my ecobag and take it home with me to finish at night. When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“It's really hard to put into words things that are just a little bit not okay.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“A problem isn't finished just because you've found the right answer.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“It was clear that he didn't remember me from one day to the next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory of the time we had spent together.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“I prefer pi.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook.
In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor