Poignant Quotes

“I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me

“She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“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

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme….

There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.

The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.

When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Life has to end. Love doesn't.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.”
― Chief Seattle, Chief Seattle's Speech (1854)

“We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“How can you hide from what never goes away?”
― Heraclitus

“Delirium: "What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?"
Dream: "There isn't one."
Delirium: "Oh. I thought maybe there was.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“Little kids shoot marbles
where the branches break the sun

into graceful shafts of light…
I just want to be pure.”
― Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries

“When we cannot look through the dusty spectrum of our memory anymore, we must invent the future and create the tools of poignant moments and unique experiences for a memorable time to come. ("Ruling the waves")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When the devil waged war in the heavens, even angels had to fall.”
― Roshani Chokshi, The Silvered Serpents

“and yet I feel that the most real home I'll ever have is the space where our roads merged and traveled along together... for a time.”
― Craig Thompson, Good-Bye, Chunky Rice

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“...you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

“We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)”
― Kristina Riggle

“Everything has a crack in it; that's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Hope is a desperate man's currency.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Little Sleep

“There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

“It's a trick question, Aquilla. A Mask is not made. She is remade. First she is destroyed. Stripped down to the trembling child that lives at her core. It doesn't matter how strong she thinks she is. Blackcliff diminishes, humiliates, and humbles her." "But if she survives, she is reborn. She rises from the shadow world of failure and despair so that she might become as fearful as that which destroyed her. So that she might know darkness and use it as her scim and shield in her mission to serve the Empire.”
― Sabaa Tahir, A Torch Against the Night

“I watch with envious eyes and mind, the single-souled who dare not feel
The wind that blows beyond the moon, who do not hear the fairy reel”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.”
― Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

“Mallory dropped her head to the steering wheel. "Look, I'm mad at you, okay? This isn't about me. I know my painful memories are relative. My life is good. I'm lucky. This isn't about how poor little Mallory has had it so hard. I'm not falling apart or anything."
He stroked a hand down her back. "Of course you're not. You're just holding the steering wheel up with your head for a minute, that's all.”
― Jill Shalvis, Lucky in Love

“Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“When I die, I'm going to tell God everything.”
― Zoulfa Katouh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

“You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Checkmate

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
― Mike Tyson

“This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation

“I think,” Jainan said slowly, “that it’s very possible to spend all your energy doing the right thing but still miss something obvious. I think that doesn’t make your effort meaningless.”
― Everina Maxwell, Winter’s Orbit