Denise Tiggelman > Denise's Quotes

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

“Destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Maybe all powerful men are cowards at heart, because in their hearts they know power is temporary.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Books are Doors and I wanted out.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“To those who go looking for doors, are brave enough to open the ones they find, and sometimes bold enough to make their own.”
― V.E. Schwab, Gallant

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“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

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And even if you were a pawn - maybe we all are - then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn't. because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’ ‘You know Thoreau?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“There is no rejection, there is only redirection.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.’ – Socrates (after losing our quiz!!!!)”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she was just scared of living. But Bertrand Russell had more marriages and affairs than hot dinners, so perhaps he was no one to give advice.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And death is the opposite of possibility.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel