sums > sums's Quotes

“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

“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

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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

“My arm was not the one she needed, but the arm of someone else. My warmth was not what she needed, but the warmth of someone else. I felt almost guilty being me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I became unsure of how to leave the mirror, how to leave the me in the mirror behind.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled & Hard Luck

“I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn't any room for tracking time. There wasn't any room to examine the past or the future, there was only the eternal now.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“He doesn’t move or speak, but he doesn’t need to. I know his desires by the pace of his breath and the tilt of his shoulders, by the shape of his jaw and the heat of his gaze. I know him, and in knowing him I love him, and in loving him I cannot do as he wishes.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“I will render you as you really were, neither cast in pristine stained glass or unholy fire. I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you. To my own haunted conscience.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“Over and over, we begin again.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn't care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apart.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Then how,” Dex said, “how does the idea of maybe being meaningless sit well with you?” Mosscap considered. “Because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful,”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I know exactly why Icarus flew so high: when you’ve spent too long in the dark, you’ll melt your own wings just to feel the sun on your skin.”
― Alix E. Harrow, Starling House

“She has a funny impulse to kiss him then, to take his germs or whatever is wrong with him into herself on a long inhalation. A disgusting sort of perversion, love.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“It occurs to me that this lonely, beastly, bleeding boy is the only person who has ever fought for me, ever stood between me and the dark and told me to save myself.”
― Alix E. Harrow, Starling House

“Love is the kind of thing that's already happening by the time you notice it, that's how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn't change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types -- love where there's an end in sight and love where there isn't.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Even if it's a lie, it's a place of my own. That's why I'm going to keep it. It doesn't need to be a big lie—just big enough for one person. And if I can hold on to that lie inside my heart, if I can keep repeating it to myself, it might lead me somewhere. Somewhere else, somewhere different. If I can do that, maybe I'll change a little, and maybe the world will, too.”
― Emi Yagi, Diary of a Void

“I think we ought to live happily ever after.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“There is no way to love a man. Not well, or rather, not correctly. Maggie knows this and loves him anyway — a vast stupidity of love that a part of her views with a painful sort of irony. Of course you love him, you fool, you idiot. What an utterly moronic thing to go and do.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow