Tamee > Tamee's Quotes

“Hey, Hachi
People always say that you only discover how precious something is after you lose it--- but I think, you only really recognize it... when you see it a second time face to face.
-Nana Osaki”
― Ai Yazawa

“Look how the moon walks on the water.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“But even when the moon looks like it's waning...it's actually never changing shape. Don't ever forget that.”
― Ai Yazawa, Nana, Vol. 14

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“CORY: The whole time I was growing up...living in his house...Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere. It weighed on you and sunk into your flesh. It would wrap around you and lay there until you couldn't tell which one was you anymore. That shadow digging in your flesh. Trying to crawl in. Trying to live through you. Everywhere I looked, Troy Maxson was staring back at me...hiding under the bed...in the closet. I'm just saying I've got to find a way to get rid of that shadow, Mama.”
― August Wilson, Fences

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I'll make you so in love with me, that everytime our lips touch, you'll die a little death.”
― Ai Yazawa

“Hey Nana,
If Cinderella's glass slipper fits so perfectly, I wonder why it fell off along the way? I can't help but think that it was on purpose, to attract the prince's affections. No matter what I do, I'll still have the fate of a girl who just keeps getting hurt, wondering if she can be happy in this pointless, one man show?”
― Ai Yazawa

“Don't you think I ever wanted other things? Don't you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me. Don't you think it ever crossed my mind to want to know other men? That I wanted to lay up somewhere and forget about my responsibilities? That I wanted someone to make me laugh so I could feel good? You not the only one who's got wants and needs. But I held on to you, Troy. I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams...and I buried them inside you. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn't take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn't never gonna bloom.”
― August Wilson, Fences

“When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave room for me.”
― August Wilson, Fences

“CORY: You ain't never gave me nothing! You ain't never done nothing but hold me back. Afraid I was gonna be better than you. All you ever did was try and make me scared of you. I used to tremble every time you called my name. Every time I heard your footsteps in the house. Wondering all the time...what's Papa gonna say if I do this?...What's he gonna say if I do that?...What's Papa gonna say if I turn on the radio? And Mama, too...she tries...but she's scared of you.”
― August Wilson, Fences

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays I didn't wind my spring.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Now in his mind he heard the voice of the Red Queen lecturing Alice: Down here we got our act clean yesterday, and we plan to start getting our act clean tomorrow, but we never clean up our act today.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“The mental and emotional torment of the old cycle of anxiety - unable to bear being alone, wanting someone always near but growing anxious when someone does get close, fearing that if they get any closer there's no telling what might happen, until the fear itself becomes unbearable and solitude seems the only solution..”
― Ryū Murakami, Piercing

“But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one's back was against the wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was rape.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye