“I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.”
“In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.”
“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.”
“There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.”
“What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?”
“Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.”
“I am Dead, but it's not so bad. I've learned to live with it.”
“It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.”
“We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.”
“My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile, because your lips have rotted off.”
“I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread.”
“Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.”
“...wanting change is step one, but step two is taking it.”
“We smile, because this is how we save the world.”
“The past is made out of facts... I guess the future is just hope.”
“What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature”
“There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.”
“What's wrong with people?" she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. "Were they born with parts missing or did it fall out somewhere along the way?”
“We're fumbling in the dark, but at least we're in motion.”
“But it does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are.”
“Here it comes. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I've decided I want to live forever.”
“I can feel it... the chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud.”
“There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.”
“If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.”
“Music? Music is life! It’s physical emotion - you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?”
“I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.”
“But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.”
“What I'm saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.”
“What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?”
“All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.”
“unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned.”
“Be terrified. Nothing in life is certain. It does not owe you anything, and if it decides to take something from you it will. You must accept this truth. Accept the dreadful possibility that your blind optimism is merely a fancied lie.”
“Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.”
“Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise castration doesn’t decrease recidivism rates; as stated in one meta-analysis, “hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with [the antiandrogenic drugs].”
“What you must first understand is the very nature of the Verity. Humans have a tendency for darkness and light. To choose good or evil. But no such mixture exists for the Verity or the Void. The Void houses no light. The Verity embraces no darkness. So when the Verity seeks a new vessel, it always searches out the purest heart--the person least likely to be swayed by darkness. A heart so true has the capacity to love like no other. And a love like that? It changes a person.”
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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