Lara Trinh > Lara's Quotes

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeleine Miller

“Don't you think that's a disease of the contemporary age? It feels like these days our value is determined by how much effort we make from day to day. That matters even more than our results. After a while, the concept of effort starts to become mixed up with things feeling difficult, and then you reach the point where the person seen as the most admirable is the one suffering the most. I think that's the reason people are so vicious towards Manako Kajii. She refuses to live that life, refuses to suffer.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“If you were accepted by just one person, then you didn’t need to be someone whose beauty was acknowledged by everyone.”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter

“I need pictures. They are like islands, places to get to in a sea of words.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder

“One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“What is the bravest thing you've ever said? asked the boy.
'Help,' said the horse.
'Asking for help isn't giving up,' said the horse. 'It's refusing to give up.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“Do you have any other advice?' asked the boy 'Don't measure how valuable you are by the way you are treated' said the horse”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“You are wise,” he said.

“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“It is funny,” she said, “that even after all this time, you still believe you should be rewarded, just because you have been obedient. I thought you would have learned that lesson in our father’s halls. None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I have aged. When I look in my polished bronze mirror, there are lines upon my face. I am thickened too and my skin has begun growing loose. I cut myself with my herbs and the scars stay. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I am vain and dissatisfied. But I do not wish myself back. Of course my flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would. There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.

Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”
― Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory