Adelka > Adelka's Quotes

“All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“People are a lot more knowable than they think they are.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“a young woman in love always looks like patience on a monument smiling at grief”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What were you before you met me?"
"I think I was drowning"
"And what are you now?"
"Water”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“You die when your spirit dies.
Otherwise, you live.
You may not do a good job of it, but you go on--
something you have no choice about.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“I’m sorry. This is not what I intended to say. What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“My dearest, darling Sidney,' There was nothing else. Only dead white paper, blank and meaningless. A comma, followed by nothing. Death summed up by grammar.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“It seems unfair, doesn't it? Our parents got to live their whole lives without anything like this."

"Busily building up the world that led to this.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Where’s the rest of it?” said Ellwood, his voice rising unpredictably.
“My,” just the word “my” would have been enough to live on, if Gaunt had ever called him that to his face.
“He never called me Sidney. Not once, in five years.” He looked up at Hayes. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Hayes. He sat stiff and upright on the bed.
“Why didn’t he finish it?”
“I don’t know,” said Hayes.
“He knew he was going to die.”
“He thought you both would.”
“But he never called me Sidney.”
He never called him any of it. My, dearest, darling. Sidney. Ellwood leant back against the window, his throat stretching long as he looked up.
“If Gaunt had been a girl, I should have married him in an instant,” he said.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“58. “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci).”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“For to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets