Herr_qim > Herr_qim's Quotes

“I remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays og Epistler

“Whenever I’m home for a few days, I start to feel this despair at being back in the place where I had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who I would be once I was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once I was free to commit mistakes on my own. How strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found—in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where I sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until I could leave this place and start my real life. But now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that I had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us—me and my brother—and now that I am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides “daughter” or “sister.” It turns out this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again. Mememememememe.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about 'family' we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to Heaven.”
― Justin Torres

“...except for the stars and a toenail clipping of moon”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“They weren't scared, or dispossessed, or fragile. They were possible.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“What happens when you die?" I asked. "Nothing happens." he said. "Nothing happens forever.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“That loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn’t make them any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn’t diminish the love. It just changes forms.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“But I guess that's the thing: we take our memories wherever we go, and what’s left are the ones that stick around, and that’s how we make a life.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“It’s hard to head home without succumbing to nostalgia, standing where so many versions of yourself once stood,”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“You’re taking up space in another human’s brain, she said. You’re a foreign entity. A parasite. That’s a lot by itself.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“There are no wastes. Either nothing is a waste, or everything is a waste.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“She read beautifully, deeply. I don't know how else to describe it.
Eventually, I finally asked her what she got out of reading these books by old dead men, what the words on the page had to do with her. The kind of question an idiot asks. But she took it seriously, she pursed her lips.
It's just another way to talk to the dead, she said.
It's another way to make a way, she said.”
― Bryan Washington, Lot

“Your eyes will show you what they want to, or whatever they think you should see.”
― Bryan Washington, Lot

“How often do you get to learn that lesson? That sometimes you just lose?”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

“This is how easy it is to walk out of a life. I’d always wondered, and now I knew.”
― Bryan Washington, Lot

“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other”
― Slavoj Zizek

“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre