Erika Levy > Erika's Quotes

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“I drank it and I said, ‘It isn’t like it seems to be.’ - ‘I know. It never is,’ he said”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“In our no-pain-no-gain dogma, the cost of something is often mistaken for its value.”
― Elissa Bassist, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The hills and trees before me, the worms and lions, stones and tender buds, Daedalus’ loom, all wavered as if they were a fraying dream. Beneath them was the place I truly dwelt, a cold eternity of endless grief.”
― 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 a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“When I was young, I overheard our palace surgeon talking. He said that the medicines he sold were only for show. Most hurts heal by themselves, if you give them enough time. It was the sort of secret I loved to discover, for it made me feel cynical and wise. I took it for philosophy. I have always been good at waiting, you see.”
― 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

“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

“Yet at least what you loved, you fought for.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“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

“That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own.”
― Toni Morrison

“Beloved wasn’t interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stick their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Maybe that's what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You can have everything and feel nothing.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Noögenic neuroses have their origin not in psychological but rather in the “noölogical” (from the Greek noös meaning mind) dimension of human existence.”
― Victor E. frankel

“A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The question which beset me was, “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
― William Butler Yeats