Maartje > Maartje's Quotes

“That time always ends a second before you’re ready.

That life is the minutes you want minus one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Humans are so ill-equipped for peace.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I found to my surprise that at the start they'd been nearly as bewildered by me as I by them.

It never occurred to me that my behavior could seem to them anything but awkward and provincial, certainly not that it would appear as enigmatic as it in fact did.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“She'd laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“No Mourners.
No Funerals.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“When people say impossible, they usually mean improbable.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“A hundred suspicions don't make a proof.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“things will never be as good as we hoped or as bad as we feared.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“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

“For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you've probably learned, having gone to Columbia.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“People would be so much more at ease if they acted on impulse rather than reason. That’s why drugs are so effective in curing mental illness—because they impair our judgment. Don’t try to think too much.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“So I told them the truth: the hours are terrible, the pay is terrible, the conditions are terrible; you’re underappreciated, unsupported, disrespected and frequently physically endangered. But there’s no better job in the world.”
― Adam Kay, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

“Good news: physio have finally been to see her. Bad news: the entry reads, ‘Patient too drowsy to assess.’ I pop in. The patient is dead.”
― Adam Kay, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

“Two faults. My race and my gender. But they are not faults. They are strength. And I am more than this man can comprehend.”
― Tracy Deonn, Legendborn