Literary masterpiece
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Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
"In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun."
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
"He is half of my soul, as the poets say."
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
"I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world."
Victoria E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
"Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you."
Victoria E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
"...it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does."
Fredrik Backman, Anxious People
"They say that a person's personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn't true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we'd never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we're more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows."
Chloe Walsh, Binding 13
"She makes my heart go, like, whoa. Boom, boom, fucking boom. All the time."
Madeline Miller, Circe
"It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two."
Madeline Miller, Circe
"A golden cage is still a cage."
Madeline Miller, Circe
"He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none."
Madeline Miller, Circe
"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."
Alice Oseman, Radio Silence
"Sometimes I think if nobody spoke to me, i'd never speak again."
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George Orwell, Animal Farm
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds
"Maybe we pray on our knees because god only listens when we're this close to the devil."
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
"A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you."
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and phvsical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
"At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived."
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.”
George Orwell, Animal Farm
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
George Orwell, 1984
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
Seneca, Letters from a stoic
“I commanded myself to live. There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.”
Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds
“Your father is only your father until one of you forgets. Like how the spine won't remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement. Ocean, are you listening? The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother's shadow falls.”
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
"Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam."
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“You once told me that the human eye is God's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“I miss you more than I remember you.”
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhó. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhó me không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?”
Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House
"There was once a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her-immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife's hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. When I met Ana I knew: I loved her to the point of invention."
Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov
"Maybe I'm not so good as I seem to you. I've a bad heart; I will have my own way."
Clementine von Radics, from James
"I fall asleep whispering "I am safer alone I am safer alone I am safer alone I am safer alone" [...] Forgive me, memory is a rope around the neck."
Homer, Iliad
"The gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again."
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rile's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
"Then suddenly you're left all alone with your body that can't love you and your will that can't save you."
Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks
"He laughs and for some reason it sounds like I'm ringing the doorbell of the house I grew up in.”
Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks
“And if I did and they cut me wide open, would I bleed loving him? When they lift my heart out of my chest cavity to weigh it, does it weigh the same as his top lip? Is his name carved into my third rib to the left? Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. He's killing me. Loving him is killing me too, and I'm afraid because how many loves really, do you get in a lifetime? How many chances do you give it before you let it go?”
Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether
"You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today."
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”
