--QUOTES--

“May flowers grow in the saddest parts of you.”
-Zainab Aamir, greeting card

 “In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.”
-Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, 2003

“Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?”
-Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, 1997

“To whom it may concern: Today, I am alive.”
-Zaina Alsous, Lemon Effigies, 2017: ‘Train of Mercury Stations Direct’


“To burn the Witch is to admit that magic exists.”
-Erin Anastasia, To Burn the Witch, 2016

“The desire to be loved is the last illusion: Give it up and you will be free.”
-Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems II: 1976-1986, 1987: ‘A Sunday Drive’

“Whose life am I living? Whose life am I failing to live?”
-Margaret Atwood, ‘The Tent,’ 2006

“I was quiet, but I was not blind.”
-Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814

“We do not suffer by accident.”
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813

“People say ‘phase’ like impermanence means insignificance. Show me a permanent state of the self.”
-Alixandra Bamford

“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself — on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”
-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
-David Benioff, dir. Troy, 2004

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”
-Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

“I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.”
“How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?”
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.”

“How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?”
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Half thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express.”
“You say I killed you — haunt me, then!”
-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“It’s okay to say to people in your life, ‘I need you to love me a little louder today.’”
-Karamo Brown

“We don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.”
-Charles Bukowski, in a letter to William Packard

“You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.”
-Abraham Maslow (UNCONFIRMED)

“A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.”
-Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques

“It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies

 “Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps modernes

“As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.”

“Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, but can you keep yourself from existing? Can you stop your thoughts?”

“One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.”

“I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.”

“Don’t you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.”

“So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.”

-Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

“Our greatest experiences are our quiet moments.”'

“People like me love only ghosts. If I ever loved a human being — I would soon go to ruin.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, in a letter to Franz Overbeck

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1911)

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“I’m a wretch. But I love, love.”
-Jack Kerouac, Little Motel: Satori In Paris, 1966

“Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land