Bookish Quotes

Such a cruel thing, memory. We can't remember what it is that we've forgotten. That we have been made to forget. That we've had to forget, in order to pretend to live here in any normal way.

The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not suppose to know it.

I try to suit the occupations to the qualifications. It's better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best. Which is how we live now.

I took care not to react. It's a skill, not reacting.

You'd be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.

The women in charge handed them tissues. They said calm things like You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong. That's another thing I've learned.

At the time I thought, why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that's happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.

I meant well too, I sometimes mumble silently. I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing. Still, think how much worse it could have been if not for me.

It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.

Why did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual? Because we'd been hearing these things for so long, I suppose. You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

Such regrets are of no practical use. I made my choices, and then having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.

Keeping up my anger was difficult, though, because by that time they were dead. You can be angry at dead people, but you can never have a conversation about what they did; or you can only have one side of it.

How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman? But perhaps it is too late for that. You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.

Right now I still have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn't that freedom of a sort?

I hope you will remember, too, that we all have some nostalgia for whatever kindness we have known as children, however bizarre the conditions of that childhood may seem to others.

I'd tempered my expectations, packed them tight into bricks, built a fortress to protect me. But keeping every glimmer of hope our has isolated me too, and I want to be seen. I want to be loved. I want to live with the hope that things can get better, even if, in the end, they don't.

"Honey." She laughs. "I'm a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who's too scared to hope."