Gabi > Gabi's Quotes

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.

Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm.

Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal.

That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.

And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Even loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“None of us are truly good,” the vicar said, at last. He put a hand on her shoulder, so gently, so kindly, and she almost threw up on the spot. “All we can do is live by the light we are given.”

“Some of us don’t have any light,” Devon said. “How are we supposed to live, then?”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“What were you before you met me?"
"I think I was drowning"
"And what are you now?"
"Water”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“we are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“When the days are darkest, dear, you latch on to happiness wherever you find it.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“My alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude.”
― Warsan Shire

“Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we're big," Noah tells him.
"What did you write?"
"I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first."
"That's a very good answer."
"Isn't it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it's just children and old people who laugh."
"Did you write that?"
"Yes."
"What did your teacher say?"
"She said I hadn't understood the task."
"And what did you say?"
"I said she hadn't understood my answer.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“It's an awful thing to miss someone who's still here.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“But the universe gave you both Noah. He’s the bridge between you. That’s why we get the chance to spoil our grandchildren, because by doing that we’re apologizing to our children.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“If there's a feeling to home, it's this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried; not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back at you as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms. Feel the ghost of your mother as you sit at the kitchen table, hear the words of your father circling round and round after dinner, and your brother stopping by, wishing you'd be a little better, a little stronger.... It's four walls echoing back everything you've ever been and everything you've ever done, and it's the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all.”
― Megan Miranda, All the Missing Girls

“The only time you've failed is if you don't try once more.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“Those who hasten to live are in a hurry to miss,”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Loving an addict is to live torn between hope and mourning, caught in an endless repetition of the five stages of grief.”
― Geneva Lee, The Sins That Bind Us

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower