MC ⋆˚꩜｡ > MC ⋆˚꩜｡'s Quotes

“Inevitably, with memory comes pain.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Death is sometimes so discreet that it steals in noiselessly, stays for only a moment and carries off its prey...”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage. How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Love is not dead, I am not dead, I still have faith in people. Once that was my greatest weakness, now it is my strength, my revenge.”
― Gisèle Pelicot, A Hymn to Life

“The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to —really had a very vivid imagination.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don’t?”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“Change often starts with the smallest of whispers. Like-minded people building it up to a roar.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“The thing about mental health was, you couldn’t take a course of antibiotics and be magically healed. Some people’s brains just thought too much or felt too much or hurt too much, and you had to stay on top of that.”
― Talia Hibbert, Take a Hint, Dani Brown

“You were healing. You’re still healing. You’ll maybe always be healing. And that’s OK. It’ll just be part of what makes you you.”
― Beth O'Leary, The Switch

“What is the job of a parent, but to teach a child she has worth so that one day she can transform herself into whatever she wants.”
― Stacey Lee, The Downstairs Girl

“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

“When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.
The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
― Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country

“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“One of them says, 'Why did they do it?'
And the other answers, 'Because they could.'
That is the only answer there ever is.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

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

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous