“It is impossible to say why we love something or someone. We can come up with reasons if we have to, but the important part happens in the dark, beyond our control. We just know when it is there. And when it goes away.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
“You can plan for things, work towards them for years, and yet they never materialize. Or you can just happen to be in the right place at the right moment, and everything falls into place. If you want to believe in something like Fate, she's a capricious character. Sometimes she stand there blocking the doorway you were born to pass through, and sometimes she takes you by the hand and leads you through the minute you poke your nose out. And the stars gaze down and keep their counsel.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
“But the simple fact of bearing a responsibility can be something that gives meaning to life.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
“The orchestra strikes up with ‘Stockholm in My Heart’, and everyone joins in. Hands sway in the air, mobile phone cameras are raised. A wonderful feeling of togetherness. It will be another fifteen minutes until, with meticulous premeditation, the whole thing is torn to shreds. Let us sing along for the time being. We have a long way to go before we return here. Only when the journey has softened us up, when we are ready to think the unthinkable, will we be permitted to come back.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
“We are always in a certain amount of pain. There is chafing somewhere, and if it isn’t in our body, then it’s in our mind. There’s an itch, all the time.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
“Alle mennesker heter egentlig noe annet.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
“the simple fact of bearing a responsibility can be something that gives meaning to life.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
“Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue green shoots and the plant called "audacity", which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. ... I will do anything to escape boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
“Other folk thought the Rage was simple bloodlust, a berserk savagery that neither knew nor cared what its target was, and so it was when it struck without warning. But when a hradani gave himself to it knowingly, it was as cold as it was hot, as rational as it was lethal. To embrace the Rage was to embrace a splendor, a glory, a denial of all restraint but not of reason. It was pure, elemental purpose, unencumbered by compassion or horror or pity, yet it was far more than mere frenzy.”
― David Weber, quote from Oath of Swords
“Hey beautiful,” Trey answers, sounding exhausted.
“Hey you.” My heart clenches in my chest from the sound of his voice.
He breathes heavily. “I’m sitting here, shirt off, beer in hand, TV on, and I feel so fucking empty.” The image of him lying on the couch we bought together, his beautiful body stretched out across the cushions, makes me ache in places I haven’t ached in a long time. I want him so bad. “I’m missing my girl tucked against my chest.”
“I would give anything to be there right now,” I answer honestly.
Sighing, he asks, “Remember that piece of spaghetti I threw on the ceiling the night before you left?”
“Yeah.” I smile to myself, thinking about that night. Trey insisted upon making spaghetti and meatballs for me. He came home with a grocery bag full of pasta, spaghetti sauce, and pre-made meatballs. When cooking the noodles, he told me an “old wives’ tale.” He said if you throw the noodles to the ceiling and it sticks, then the pasta is done. What he didn’t realize is if that pasta never comes down, you overcooked it.
“It fell this morning. Scared the shit out of me. I thought it was a spider trying to bury itself in my hair while I was making eggs.”
A laugh bursts out of me as I think about Trey bouncing around the apartment, spaghetti in hair thinking it was a spider. “Oh no. Miss Pasta-relli finally fell?”
“She did and that squirrely bitch knew exactly what she was doing, too. Trying to scare the crap right out of me.”
“Seems like she did.” I chuckle.
“But I got the last laugh when I turned the trash compactor on. Her little pasta self squiggled down the drain. Revenge never felt so sweet.”
Still laughing, I shake my head. “Is this what your life has come to? Fighting with old, overcooked pasta?”
“I’m telling you, Amelia, with you gone, I’ve lost my damn mind.”
“Sounds like it”
― Meghan Quinn, quote from The Other Brother
“Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.”
― Min Jin Lee, quote from Pachinko
“The hillside was thick with trees, the same hill we had left barren the day before.”
― Ruth Emmie Lang, quote from Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
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