Quotes from Magonia

Maria Dahvana Headley ·  309 pages

Rating: (15K votes)


“I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“If you look at the sky that way, it’s this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“Death is the Santa Claus of the adult world. Except Santa Claus in reverse. The guy who takes all the presents away.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I'm dark matter. The universe inside of me is full of something, and science can't even shine a light on it. I feel like I'm mostly made of mysteries.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“Because every time someone finds a new animal, or a new amazing thing on earth, it means we haven't broken everything yet.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia



“You hold no horrors for me”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I {} you more than [[[{{{}}}]]].”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I can't imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“Yes, I’m a reader. Kill me. I could tell you I was raised in the library and the books were my only friends, but I didn’t do that, did I? Because I have mercy. I’m neither a genius nor a kid destined to become a wizard. I’m just me. I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I like the sky. It's rational to me in a way that life isn't.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia



“Did he just say stormsharks? My inner nerd is elated. Can anything I will ever hear from now until the end of time sound cooler than stormsharks?”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I don't think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“Life and death aren’t as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn’t like walking into a new country. This is like walking into a new room in the same house. This is like sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there’s a glass wall between.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I know everyone has dreams of flying, but this isn’t a dream of flying. It’s a dream of floating, and the ocean is not water but wind.

I call it a dream, but it feels realer than my life.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“Looping. Some days are so dark I can't see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia



“Even people who've never seen a miracle can believe in miracles.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I think about celestial junk. Like, maybe every planet in this solar system is discarded by giant hands. Each star a crumpled ball of paper, a love letter lit on fire, a smoldering bit of cigarette ash.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“And there's the loudest sound I've ever heard and the brightest white I've ever seen, and I'm made of it, I'm-
I'm made of light
I'm made of heat
And I'm flying”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“My thing is a Mystery and not just a Mystery, but Bermuda--no sun, only Triangle. Unknowable. Unsolvable.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“You’ve never seen surprise until you’ve looked into the eyes of an ascending bovine.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia



“It felt like she took off running without me. Her fingers clenched in on mine. Then relaxed, like she'd lost all her bones.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I need to get onto Aza’s ship. I know where it’s going. I think I know, even though all I really know, all I’ve really known since I was five, is that Aza is my universe.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“Some days I'm just sixteen, and sixteen isn't what I want to be.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“People, alas, don't document things with any kind of precision. They fill Twitter with blurry photos.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“Nothing like trouble to make a day pass faster.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia



“Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“I think of the note.

I want to say me too.

I want to say I know.

I want to say I can read the gaps in your sentences. I can read the space between your letters. I know your language. It’s my language too.

I want to say that.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


“The sound coming out of me is nothing like a cough, nothing even in the same category of a song, but some kind of bird of prey roar, shredding my throat, pulsating my fingers, and Milekt beneath it, singing inside my voice, amplifying me, and making me stronger.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, quote from Magonia


About the author

Maria Dahvana Headley
Born place: in The United States
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Popular quotes

“At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life. Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious”
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“One must know the problem better than the solution, or the solution becomes the problem.”
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“But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city...”
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