Roya > Roya's Quotes

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“El mundo se cae a pedazos y casi siempre todo se va a la mierda y casi siempre dañamos a las personas que queremos o ellas nos dañan a nosotros irremediablemente y no parece haber motivos para albergar ninguna clase de esperanza, pero al menos esta historia termina bien, termina aquí, con la escena de estos dos poetas chilenos que se miran a los ojos y que lanzan risotadas y que por ningún motivo quieren irse de ese bar, así que piden otra ronda de cerveza.”
― Alejandro Zambra, Poeta chileno

“I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.”
― William Golding

“I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“There are always risks in life, my little ones. If you don’t take risks, you simply endure, and if you endure, you die—even if it’s only boredom that kills you.”
― Négar Djavadi, Disoriental

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for most part has been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he is talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me.”
― Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“John's eyes turned to me. I saw no resignation in them, no hope of heaven, no dawning peace. How I would love to tell you that I did. How I would love to tell myself that. What I saw was fear, misery, incompletion and incomprehension. They were the eyes of a trapped and terrified animal.”
― Stephen King

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Love is the bold affirmation of hope. You don't embrace hope when death and destruction are in command. You don't put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don't lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood. You don't fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees