Quotes from Mordacious

Sarah Lyons Fleming ·  524 pages

Rating: (820 votes)


“You draw a line in the sand and say you won’t cross it, you won’t believe or do a particular thing. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the unbelievable, or you’ve done what you’ve sworn you’d never do, you redraw the line a little farther back. You let the waves wash the first away like it never existed.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


“He’s funny and attractive. That doesn’t mean I want to sleep with him.” “That always means you want to sleep with someone.” “Thanks a lot,” I say. “Was that a thinly-veiled slut accusation?” “That’s funny, it wasn’t supposed to be thinly-veiled.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


“What a dick,” she says. “You know what the worst part is?” “That there are forty people left in the world and he’s one of them?”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


“As a child, I prayed she’d live, that she’d make it through the night. Eventually, I prayed she’d choke to death in her sleep. Not very kind, I know, but it would have meant escape. I was a prisoner of war in my mother’s battle with herself, and the only liberator was death.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


“My mother will never make amends, will never be held accountable. She’s died just as selfishly as she lived. I contemplate kicking the bed. I go as far as lifting my foot but then imagine the rabbit hole of anger I’ll fall into if I give in to my wild urge. I won’t let my mother get to me.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious



“Everyone’s nice,” I say, and think of Paul. “Well, maybe not everyone, but I like everybody else. How about that?” I prod her with my elbow. “I like people.” “You know what’s happening? You’re having corrective emotional experiences. That’s where—” I groan. “No, we are not having a Psychoanalyze Sylvie session on the roof. We’re making fun of Paul and possibly shopping, not discussing correctional emotions or whatever.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


“Dark humor is in our genes. I can die having laughed every chance I got, or I can die having been miserable. Either way, I’ll be dead. Besides, I didn’t mean it as much of a joke.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


“I know this disbelief I feel, the disbelief on the others’ faces, is a survival mechanism. You draw a line in the sand and say you won’t cross it, you won’t believe or do a particular thing. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the unbelievable, or you’ve done what you’ve sworn you’d never do, you redraw the line a little farther back. You let the waves wash the first away like it never existed.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


“If I stay within the tree line at the edge of the field, my buddies across the way won’t notice, as they’re now chasing a bird. The bird lands to peck at the grass and, when they get close again, it flaps another ten feet and lands. I think it’s fucking with them.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from Mordacious


About the author

Sarah Lyons Fleming
Born place: in Brooklyn, NY, The United States
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Popular quotes

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“Beauvoir knew that the root of all evil wasn’t money. No, what created and drove evil was fear. Fear of not having enough money, enough food, enough land, enough power, enough security, enough love. Fear of not getting what you want, or losing what you have.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Beautiful Mystery


“One might be tempted to extol as an advance over Sophocles the radical tendency of Euripides to produce a proper relation between art and the public. But "public," after all, is a mere word. In no sense is it a homogeneous and constant quantity. Why should the artist be bound to accommodate himself to a power whose strength lies solely in numbers? And if, by virtue of his endowments and aspirations, he should feel himself superior to every one of these spectators, how could he feel greater respect for the collective expression of all these subordinate capacities than for the relatively highest-endowed individual spectator?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner


“There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales


“Three days after a German submarine sank the Lusitania, Wilson addressed an audience of recently naturalized citizens in Philadelphia. "You cannot become thorough Americans", he told them, "if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups, A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American".

"We can have no 'fifty-fifty' allegiance in the country", Theodore Roosevelt said two years later. "Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all". He condemned Americans who saw the world from the standpoint of another nation. "We Americans are children of the crucible", T.R. said. "The crucible does not do its work unless it turns out those cast into it in one national mould".”
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