Haley > Haley's Quotes

“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations… It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm… Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings. —Benedict Anderson”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others".”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?” She”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there any limit to the desire for more?”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black,” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the ‘wrong’ side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Anyone questioning whether god exists need only consider the brevity of a dog’s life span. If there was a god, let alone a benevolent one, dogs would have life spans similar to parrots.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules... was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“I thought about how the world can be anything and how said it is that it's this.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“I was starting to feel adrift from the whole setup, like the dynamic that had eventually revealed itself didn't interest me, or even involve me. I could have tried harder to engage myself, but I probably resented having to make an effort to be noticed.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“What Slavoj said was this: People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced. If even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. And he said you don’t have to worry about being creative. The world is creative, endlessly so, and its generative nature is part of who you are. The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so. We are here to help you.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“thought about how maybe the constancy of our surroundings makes us believe in a constancy of reality and of self.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“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

“You don't need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

“It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.”
― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage