Isabella Grace > Isabella's Quotes

“You can whisper, and people will still hear thunder.”
― Neal Shusterman, The Toll

“How to kill yourself without hurting anyone.

Don't.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“You will never be more wrong than the first time you say "I love you." You will mean it, sure, but you'll still be lying.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“Things that I Hope Are True about Heaven

That the radio always plays what would have been your favourite songs. That there's always coffee if you want it. That you're there. That it's real.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“but it would be nice to say It’s raining only on my head rather than I have a chemical imbalance in my brain or I just remembered that someone I love will die before I do.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“This is what it's like to say goodnight and mean goodbye.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“...and I am sitting in this park watching an old couple almost cry together, and I want this to be the most important thing I do all year.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“When you're dumb enough for long enough, you're gonna meet someone too smart to love you, and they're gonna love you anyway, and its gonna go so poorly.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“I will whisper your name
From the cracks in the canyon rocks

And you will know that this is heaven,
Knowing that someone will always remember

Your irises and where you hid your love
Letters and why you could never speak

In anything but short sentences.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“Now I just think about who else is kissing her. I can't breathe because he only kisses her once. He doesn't care if its perfect.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“The feet walk fast for the loving heart’s sake, but when you feel no longing, your feet drag and ache”
― Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Who am I? Who am I?”
“You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs. You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen. You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way. You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it. You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again. You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”

"And who are you?"
"I'm Willem Ragnarsson. And I will never let you go.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality––Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom––but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself––his very life––has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“My older self knows that you must stop—in the middle of the chaos—to take in the world around you. To breathe in deeply, smell the sunscreen and the rubber of the ball, let the breeze blow across your neck, feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. In this respect, I love the way the world has aged me.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside”
― Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War