Shima > Shima's Quotes

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“Forbidden things are open to the imagination.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“Such a cruel thing, memory. We can’t remember what it is that we’ve forgotten. That we have been made to forget. That we've had to forget, in order to pretend to live here in a normal way.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would. There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“one’s self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“People eat the shit you shovel them.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“the highest among us aren’t always the wisest,”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“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

“The shape of the power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.
When does power exist? Only in the moment it is exercised.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“Power doesn't care who uses it.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought if I did normal things - held down a job, for example - I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The speed of time varied, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident? It seemed implausible.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation