Alyssa Bohn > Alyssa's Quotes

“Maybe there were no villains in my mother's story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“To whatever end.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

“In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.”
― Kristin Hannah, Night Road

“Maybe for some people, falling in love is an explosion, fireworks against a black sky and tremors rumbling through the earth. One blazing moment. For me, it's been happening for months, as quietly as a seed sprouting. Love sneaked through me, spreading roots around my heart, until, in the blink of an eye, the green of it broke the dirt: hidden one moment, there the next.”
― Emily Henry, A Million Junes

“We may just be moments, but to love a handful of people very well, that's a good life.”
― Emily Henry, A Million Junes

“I think we're supposed to experience as much beauty as we can.
Isn't that the same as happiness, too?
No, because sometimes sad things are beautiful.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been with Me

“Nothing is all good or all bad. Life is so much messier than that.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Time moves so fucking fast. Blink, and you're halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks- for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm- and constant.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“But sometimes remembering isn't for yourself; sometimes you do it just to make someone else smile.”
― Holly Jackson, A Good Girl's Guide To Murder

“The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“How many loves do you get in a lifetime?

How many people do you get to call yours? There are all sorts of loves in this world, not all of them, but most of them are beautiful. Some are old, some noble, some brave. Others are dishonourable and weak and make you so by association. Some are a low whisper on a sombre night, some are maddening. Some you can’t ignore—they slow-burn inside of you, never quite going out completely but you’re too scared to dare try to fan that flame. Some loves you pretend you don’t feel, even when you can, even when you know you do, even if he’s the first thing you think of in the morning, even if he’s like a match in the darkened room of your heart—because loving something how you love him is a painful love that puts rocks in your pockets and melancholy in your eyeballs and if time has taught you anything it’s that it doesn’t matter. You’ll love him forever anyway.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks

“I know that some love is beautiful, and some is freeing, some unravels you, some love poisons you, some blinds you, some betters you, and some loves break you in invisible ways that no one else knows about until you have to stand up and the weight of your love crushes your bones.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks

“we keep losing each other, and it doesn’t seem to matter that we love each other how we do, which is with a fullness—kind of like those animals that will eat themselves to death if they’re left to their own devices. I’ll love him ’til I die, love him ’til it consumes me whole and kills me dead—so maybe love doesn’t conquer all but just some.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks

“When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir

“Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I'm bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is- just me and the trees and the sky and the seas- I know now that that's enough.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live. We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end. We marvel at a nectarine sunset over the M25 or the smell of a baby’s head or the efficiency of flat-pack furniture, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir

“Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“Men want power because it makes them feel good. Women want power because it lets us do things.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo