#booktag.

❛ But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. ❜

❛ He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none. ❜

❛ Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. ❜

❛ It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness.  ❜

❛ If I had ever believed it, I no longer do. ❜

❛ I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. ❜

❛ I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ❜

❛ I have a better idea. I will do as I please. ❜

❛ All my life has been murk and depths, but I am not a part of that dark water. I am a creature within it. ❜

❛ You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see. ❜

❛ When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world. ❜

❛ When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist. ❜

❛ But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. ❜

❛ I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. ❜

❛ This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. ❜

❛ You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you. ❜

❛ Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. ❜

❛ If now I am wise, it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes. ❜

❛ You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite. ❜

❛ Give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for. ❜

❛ I have been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that is only a shape I’ve been poured into. I do not have to keep it. ❜

❛ I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. ❜

❛ Understanding the world is a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. ❜

❛ Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two. ❜

❛ The truth is, men make terrible pigs. ❜

❛ My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it. ❜

❛ This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh. ❜

❛ Witches are not so delicate. ❜

❛ Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats. ❜

❛ Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters. ❜

❛ I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in. ❜

❛ Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win. ❜

❛ The world's a hard place. It doesn't care. It doesn't hate you and me, but it doesn't love us, either. ❜

❛ The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge. ❜

❛ Pull your act together and just go on. ❜

❛ I had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there is nothing physically wrong. I hurt all the time. ❜

❛ Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty. ❜

❛ Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford? ❜

❛ Truth comes out. In the end it always comes out. ❜

❛ Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are. ❜

❛ No matter where you go, the same asshole gets off the plane. ❜

❛ We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives. ❜

❛ That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. ❜

❛ Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. ❜

❛ God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you. ❜

❛ Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you. ❜

❛ How many times, over how many years, have I—a grown adult—asked for the mercy of another chance? ❜

❛ I was suddenly so sick of myself, so revolted. ❜

❛ You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. ❜

❛ But those pieces, they’ll never fit just the same way again. Never in this world. ❜

❛ Dying is a part of living. You have to keep tuning in to that if you expect to be a whole person. ❜

❛ Officious little prick. ❜

❛ I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. — The plants are moving under the rug. ❜

❛ How I wish you were fear. ❜

❛ But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie. ❜

❛ All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. After all, we're missing the party. ❜

❛ We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. ❜

❛ The way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. ❜

❛ The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you. ❜

❛ Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. ❜

❛ Women get consumed. ❜

❛ Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them. ❜

❛ A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort. ❜

❛ Safer to be feared than loved. ❜

❛ I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence. ❜

❛ It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying. ❜

❛ I always feel sad for the girl that I was. ❜

❛ Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes. ❜

❛ How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. ❜

❛ See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was. ❜

❛ Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. ❜

❛ To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting. ❜

❛ I'm here. I don't usually feel that I am. ❜

❛ I'm tired of dying. ❜

❛ What if you hurt because it feels so good? ❜

❛ How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow. ❜

❛ Do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait? ❜

❛ Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own. ❜

❛ Everyone has their own version of a memory. ❜

❛ Isn’t a smile a girl’s best weapon? ❜

❛ My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past. ❜

❛ Do what I want; I might like you. ❜

❛ I feel sorry for Persephone because even when she’s back with the living, people are afraid of her because of where’s she’s been. ❜

❛ She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. ❜

❛ The sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. ❜

❛ It infects you. It ruined me. ❜

❛ Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects. ❜

❛ All hope abandon, ye who enter here. ❜

❛ The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain. ❜

❛ The love that moves the sun and the other stars. ❜

❛ The devil is not as black as he is painted. ❜

❛ Through me you pass into the city of woe. Through me you pass into eternal pain. ❜

❛ Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice.  ❜

❛ There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery. ❜

❛ Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. ❜

❛ Without hope we live on in desire. ❜

❛ Make my veins and pulses tremble. ❜

❛ I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath. ❜

❛ I found myself within a forest dark. ❜

❛ If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought. ❜

❛ Here were every fruit and never-ending spring. ❜

❛ The well heeded well heard. ❜

❛ Through me the way that runs among the lost. ❜

❛ A longer ladder still is to be climbed. ❜

❛ Why should you care about what's whispered here? ❜

❛ Why have you let your mind get so entwined? ❜

❛ I was told about this torture, that it was the hell of carnal sins when reasons give way to desire. ❜

❛ What is it then? Why do you hesitate? ❜

❛ Why do you relish living like a coward? ❜

❛ A just request is to be met in silence, by the act. ❜

❛ There was not, nor will be, from the first day to the last night, an act so glorious and so magnificent. ❜

❛ Your name is widely known in hell! ❜

❛ Oh human creatures, born to soar aloft, why fall ye thus before a little wind? ❜

❛ That brute which knows no peace came ever nearer me and, step by step, drove me back down to where the sun is mute. ❜

❛ The shining strengthened me against the fright whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart through all the terrors of that piteous night. ❜

❛ It was so dark, and deep, and clouded, that I could see nothing by staring into its depths. ❜

❛ We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. ❜

❛ Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women. ❜

❛ The strongest of all warriors are these two — time and patience. ❜

❛ If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. ❜

❛ There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. ❜

❛ The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness. ❜

❛ Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy. ❜

❛ It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ❜

❛ You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. ❜

❛ If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed. ❜

❛ We are asleep until we fall in love! ❜

❛ I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. ❜

❛ Everything I know, I know because of love. ❜

❛ Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. ❜

❛ If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ❜

❛ Yes, love, but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. ❜

❛ How can one be well...when one suffers morally? ❜

❛ Kings are the slaves of history. ❜

❛ God is the same everywhere. ❜

❛ Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. ❜

❛ One must be cunning and wicked in this world. ❜

❛ We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them. ❜

❛ When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair! ❜

❛ For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed? ❜

❛ He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died. ❜

❛ Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps. ❜

❛ Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. ❜

❛ The distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. ❜

❛ How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? ❜

❛ There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too. ❜

❛ The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them. ❜

❛ Life is warped. I'm just in sync. ❜

❛ Now it's a whisper from the past. ❜

❛ But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more. ❜

❛ Why is it always such a surprise? The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush. ❜

❛ Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it. ❜

❛ What is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?  ❜

❛ I have scars, inside me. ❜

❛ The dead are not entirely dead but are alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. ❜

❛ However dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void. ❜

❛ Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. ❜

❛ It is another way of saying tough luck. To people you aren’t going to help out. ❜

❛ I'm waiting, far off in the future. ❜

❛ The only sure camouflage is unpredictability. ❜

❛ There are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. ❜

❛ First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled. ❜

❛ I long to swim in liquid moonlight. ❜

❛ That's right, I don’t like to be summoned on trivial matters. ❜

❛ The part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. ❜

❛ Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew. ❜

❛ Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. ❜

❛ At last. It's you. ❜

❛ No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish. ❜

❛ Take what the moment offers. Don’t close doors. Be thankful. ❜

❛ How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. ❜

❛ Is it disapproval or extreme lust? With some men it’s hard to tell the difference. ❜

❛ My hair was driving me crazy, but then … I died. ❜

❛ Seek and ye shall find, eventually. And you found. You’re right, I don’t dispute that. Sorry. ❜

❛ My head was once a filing cabinet. Now it’s a flurry of papers, floating on a draft. ❜

❛ You cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there. ❜

❛ I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about. ❜

❛ And if I don’t want to die, I’ve got to start living. ❜

❛ The world is a beautiful place. Don’t forget that. And don’t miss it. ❜

❛ I was fighting for my life. So I must not want to die. ❜

❛ Something’s happening to me, through me, something dangerous and new. ❜

❛ It’s taken root, a poison tree; it’s grown, fanning out, vines winding round my gut, my lungs, my heart. ❜

❛ We’re interpreters. We’re translators. ❜

❛ You’ll notice I’m not asking what made you this way. ❜

❛ No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other. Tolstoy was chock-fullo’shit. Remember that. ❜

❛ We lived in monochrome those nights. ❜

❛ You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? ❜

❛ Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? ❜

❛ I stand here in the dark: cold, utterly alone, full of fear and something that feels like longing. ❜

❛ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. ❜

❛ Not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye. ❜

❛ Selective emotional detachment. ❜

❛ Not for me, or at least not today. ❜

❛ Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene. ❜

❛ Do I sound like a hillbilly saying that? ❜

❛ Remember, you’ve got your secret weapon. ❜

❛ The dream drains away like water. The memory, really. I try to scoop it up in my palms, but it’s gone. ❜

❛ My shadow stretches along the carpet, as though trying to detach itself from me. ❜

❛ It curls away from me, like blood in water. ❜

❛ It’s been so long since I felt the rain. Or wind—the caress of wind. ❜

❛ But snow I never want to feel again. ❜

❛ Through adversity to the stars. ❜

❛ No hero. No sleuth. I am locked in. I am locked out. ❜

❛ Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. ❜

❛ I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.  ❜

❛ If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. ❜

❛ I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other. ❜

❛ But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. ❜

❛ I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other would have borne it. ❜

❛ There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves. ❜

❛ One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ❜

❛ Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. ❜

❛ You must be the best judge of your own happiness. ❜

❛ Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing ; but I have never been in love ; it is not my way, or my nature ; and I do not think I ever shall. ❜

❛ Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise. ❜

❛ If I have not spoken, it is because I am afraid I will awaken myself from this dream. ❜

❛ If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. ❜

❛ Faultless in spite of all her faults. ❜

❛ A heroine whom no one but myself will much like. ❜

❛ There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart. ❜

❛ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the desert air. ❜

❛ I pity you. I thought you cleverer. ❜

❛ Evil to some is always good to others. ❜

❛ I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. ❜

❛ She is loveliness itself. ❜

❛ Time does not compose me. ❜

❛ A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her. ❜

❛ I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice. ❜

❛ I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be any more. ❜

❛ I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment. ❜

❛ I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed. ❜

❛ With all your little faults, you are an excellent creature. ❜