• There are some sorrows so great they are unspeakable, taking hold in the body and leaving a void after the fact. There are some depths that love can never again reach. The mind anoints every fossil with significance in an attempt to preseve it—but in time, they all invariably turn to dust
    • Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, Bonnie Huie (translator)
  • It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it's an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Don't I play it well?
    • Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
  • Was she born with that attitude or did it accrete on her like an irascible pearl?
    • Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
  • Strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none.
    • A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab
  • Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.
    • Blindness by José Saramago
  • Enduring what should be unendurable, not saying the things that needed to be said—that allowed opposing egos to inflate unchecked and let them think that their self-centredness was acceptable in any situation.
    • Endurance (Legend of the Galactic Heroes #3) by Yoshiki Tanaka, Daniel Huddleston (Translator)
  • Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.
    • The Four Generations of Chang E by Zen Cho
  • Each new wave of humanity found itself crashing onto a beach that was a little more cluttered from what had come before, a little more damaged from the carelessness of others.
    • Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
  • I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?
    • An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
  • This is not a groundless anxiety from which I suffer. I don't see problems that don't exist. These are objective truths; there are statistics and measurements to back it up. It's all actually happening. If others aren't experiencing stressful reactions to the situation, then it's a flaw in their psychological makeup, not mine.
    • Tyrannosaurs Bask in the Warmth of the Asteroid by Gareth E. Rees
  • To let her be alone with her grief, or whatever heavier thing she'd put on top to hold it down.
    • Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
apr 5 2017 ∞
jul 2 2023 +