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  • "He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved." — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • "...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully." — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • "It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable." — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • “And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.” — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • “Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?” — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • “(...) a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it.” — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • “They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.” — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • "She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness." — Maggie Stiefvater, the Raven Boys
  • "He left bloody fingerprints on the rock, but there was something satisfying about that. I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed." — Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue
  • “How arrogant we are, Adam thought, to deliver babies who can't walk or talk or feed themselves. How sure we are that nothing will destroy them before they can take care of themselves. How fragile they were, how easily abandoned and neglected and beaten and hated. Prey animals were born afraid.” — Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue
  • "What do you want, Adam? To feel awake when my eyes are open.” — Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves
  • "If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking and you beat love down." — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
  • "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
  • "Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged." — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
  • "You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know." — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • “Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.” — Richard Siken, Crush
  • “You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • “We have not touched the stars, / nor are we forgiven, which brings us back/ to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, / not from the absence of violence, but despite / the abundance of it.” — Richard Siken, Crush
  • “Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History
  • “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think" — Donna Tartt, The Secret History
  • “Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History
  • “It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly” — These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever
  • “I hope you looked west while I was looking east, and that for a momento you met my eyes without knowing it. I know you never look away, ever when your eyes are closed, but I'm never certain you can see what's really there. I miss you to pieces." — These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever
  • “He wanted to forget he'd ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.” — These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever
jul 30 2020 ∞
sep 5 2021 +