Melanie > Books: read-in-2016‎ (116)

“But no man is all one thing; none of us are pure in our beliefs or our devotions. We are all bound by the frailties of our humanity, some of which feed our hatred, some of which, very occasionally, make us want to be something better.”

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

“Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

“Maybe there were people who lived those lives. Maybe this girl was one of them. But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary.”

“And then—then I learned your name. Hearing you say it … it was like an answer to a question I’d been asking for five hundred years.”

“Sometimes your heart is the only thing worth listening to.”

“This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.”

“Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world... Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out.”

“Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn't broken.”

“You're nobody's rainbow.
You're nobody's princess.
You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”

“Each new person we welcome into our hearts is a chance to evolve into something radically differ

“Each new person we welcome into our hearts is a chance to evolve into something radically different than we used to be.”

“Together, my parents had learned to be much more than "the sum of their parts", whatever that means. Separately, they were kind of just a mess.”

“Adulthood just meant finding the variety of crazy that resonated

“Adulthood just meant finding the variety of crazy that resonated the most with you and doing it until you died or it killed you—whichever came first.”

“It doesn’t matter who she was. It matters who she can become…”

“Don’t let the shadows of the past smother the possibility for a bright future.”

“She waited for him to say something more. The silence held ciphers of truths that lingered between them, written in a script that neither knew yet how to decipher. This would not be the moment they were given sound.”

“The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.”

“Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”

“Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

“The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black,” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.”

“Rage won’t hel

“Rage won’t help you understand death, nor sorrow, and if there’s one thing the dead deserve, it is for their true story to be told.”

“Deato mendea valus febletta. The Gods give every man a weakness.”

“But no man is all one thing; none of us are pure in our beliefs or our devotions. We are all bound by the frailties of our humanity, some of which feed our hatred, some of which, very occasionally, make us want to be something better.”

“Nothing lasts for ever, Falcio. Not people, not castles, not even Gods.”

“When you read it, you will know that I loved you even before I was a man, and that you were my Queen even before you wore a crown. You will know that I have spent every day since I first met you trying to become a man worthy of your esteem, and if after finishing this letter you look up at me and smile, it will all have been worth it.”

“There are battles and accidents; there are collapses and plagues

“There are battles and accidents; there are collapses and plagues. There is silence only when one side wins or everyone has died.”

“What disease cannot do, people accomplish with astonishing ease.”

“Expiration date of body > expiration date of canned tuna.”

“Good old Planned Parenthood. Saved my life.”

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.”

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”