alfo > alfo's Quotes

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“La gente triste no tiene piedad.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego

“Cuánto duraba el ahora, cuánto tiempo era el presente.”
― Mariana Enriquez, Nuestra parte de noche

“I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Then, Beowulf says wistfully, "Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“A song I used to hate that I loved surround-sounds my soul. It is a song about nightmares dressed as daydreams, about trading your soul for a kiss. I think not this song, never this song, but my soul is already singing along, riding its swells like an ocean wave, shimmering.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“I would say I'm less afraid of dying than I am of life.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Maybe [the ocean and I] were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up--boats, people--but it didn't look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that. It made me wonder what was inside of me.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“My mother had never known me either, though it wasn't because I hadn't given her a chance. I'd given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn't seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn't even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so? Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Meanwhile I am only twenty years old, and the days descend on me un-noticeably like dust, each one just like the rest.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
― Mary Oliver, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

“He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“And isn't that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“I called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. When she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and I let her step inside.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“I do not even struggle to speak. The spark of words dies so deep in my chest, there is not even space to mount them on an exhale.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“I felt like she was seared into my time line, unchangeable as Pompeii.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“My body radiates pain, is dense with it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“... I could have scooped despair from the air by the handfuls.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories