sophia > sophia's Quotes

“I wish to go on living even after my death.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Paper is more patient than man.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Memories mean more to me than dresses.”
― Anne Frank

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet, at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man behind us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh..

And sometimes, it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“I would be more," I said. "I would be all.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I can veil the sky itself. Just try to watch me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But then there are those who wear their destinies like nooses, whose lives run straight as planks, however they try to twist it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Whatever you do, I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head. I said nothing, and let her dance.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“A golden cage is still a cage.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer.

Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“When I was young, I overheard our palace surgeon talking. He said that the medicines he sold were only for show. Most hurts heal by themselves, he said, if you give them enough time. It was the sort of secret I loved to discover, for it made me feel cynical and wise. I took it for a philosophy.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.

All my life I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal's voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.”
― 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.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“When a girl cries, few things are more worthless than a boy.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Ruby, give me one reason why we can’t be together, and I’ll give you a hundred why we can. We can go anywhere you want. I’m not your parents. I’m not going to abandon you or send you away, not ever.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Maybe nothing will ever change for us. But don't you want to be around just in case it does?”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“Interesting" had been his only comment.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love. --Sophocles.
And below it: Lulu, please forgive me. I love you. --Ben.”
― Sara Biren, The Last Thing You Said

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library