Ellie > Ellie's Quotes

“To other people, it sometimes seems like nothing at all. You are walking around with your head on fire and no one can see the flames.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“We came home. I took off all the clothes that I wore in there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my hat to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain… You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“We paid for the dormitory ourselves. For fourteen nights. It was a hospital for radiation poisoning. Fourteen nights. That’s how long it takes for person to die.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Evil is not an actual substance. It is the absence of good, in the way that darkness is simply the absence of light.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“In my opinion -- we're the raw materials for a scientific experiment, for an international laboratory. There are ten million Bellarussians, and two million of us live on poisoned land. It's a huge devil's laboratory.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“I did not mind the emptiness either. For a thousand years I had tried to fill the space between myself and my family”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He has a knowing look in his eye, but then the lines around his eyes fall a little. “You’ll cry tonight. In bed. That’s when it’ll hurt the most. When you’re alone.”
― Colleen Hoover, All Your Perfects

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He was not so easy and even as he pretended. Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust by about one hour.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Black children have to lose their innocence before white children do. They can't afford the luxury of just reading about the impact of racism and white supremacy in a book, because they're living it every day. Because oftentimes it means life or death.”
― Frederick Joseph, The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person

“I've come to realize that a fear of accountability is why white people say things like 'I don't see color' and 'Why does everything have to be about race?' Because to see my color, to see my culture, to see my race, would also mean taking responsibility for how white people have historically treated people my color, with my culture, from my race.”
― Frederick Joseph, The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person

“Because Black kids don’t get to make mistakes. Black kids don’t get to be kids. Black kids get judgment and bullets.”
― Frederick Joseph, The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person

“If you feel you don’t need to read this book because you’re already a decent white person, there’s a good chance you’re not as decent as you think.”
― Frederick Joseph, The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person

“Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“At its worst you find yourself wishing, desperately, for any other affliction, any physical pain, because the mind is infinite, and its torments – when they happen – can be equally infinite.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“And by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Adeline is sixteen now, and everyone speaks of her as if she is a summer bloom, something to be plucked, and propped within a vase, intended only to flower and then to rot. Like Isabelle, who dreams of family instead of freedom, and seems content to briefly blossom and then wither.”
― V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“A passionate affair, to be sure, but only because time is a luxury she can’t afford. Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with knowing. There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“It’s not you.
We can’t help who we fall in love with.
(And who we don’t.)”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“But as they move through the carnival of free exhibits, the artists all turn to look at Addie. He may be a sun, but she is a shining comet, dragging their focus like burning meteors in her wake.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I call it weakness. To only walk in circles when you could make new roads.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I was falling for you, Matt. And I’m too tired to fall anymore. I’vealready hit rock bottom once this year. And I don’t want to hit it again. I can’thit it again. Because I won’t be able to keep going this time.”
― Ivy Smoak, Untouchable

“and so she left, whereas then she realized that just because she was planted here does not mean here is where she has to grow.”
― Rhiannon Janae, Words You Never Thought You'd Hear

“those who have hurt us have helped us figure out what we don’t want to become.”
― Rhiannon Janae, Words You Never Thought You'd Hear

“I’ve longed to trace
my fingers
across your delicate terrain,
limbs entangled, heavy in
this bed we’ve made.”
― Orion Carloto, Film for Her