aims > aims's Quotes

“The sadness will last forever.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I went looking for my dreams outside of myself and discovered, it's not what the world holds for you, it's what you bring to it.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
― Michel de Montaigne , The Complete Essays

“Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.”
― Françoise Sagan

“Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“The croissant was crisp and soft and flaky at the same time. Just biting it made you feel cared for.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush