Gabriela Avelino > Gabriela's Quotes

“The books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us. I can see it in you, sure as I see it in me. You're a daughter of the words. A girl with a story to tell.”
― Jay Kristoff, Nevernight

“You deserve every star in the galaxy laid out at your feet and a thousand diamonds in your hair. You deserve someone who'll run with you as far and as fast as you want to. Holding your hand, not holding you back.”
― Jay Kristoff, Illuminae

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”
― Anthony Doerr

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I think I like my brain best
in a bar fight with my heart.
I think I like myself a little broken,
with rough edges, a little harder
to grasp. I like poetry
better than therapy anyway.
The poems never judge me
for healing wrong.”
― Clementine von Radics, Mouthful of Forevers

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“But when the heart grows too full, it overflows. And mine, inevitably, overflows on to a page.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“I'm not going to die," she said. "Not till I've seen it."
"Seen what?"
Her smile widened. "Everything.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“Humanity is good. Some people are terrible and broken, but humanity is good. I believe that.”
― Hank Green

“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it'll be here well after they walk away from it.

My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Miracles

“Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“There's no point in wishing. We can't change anything about the past. We can only remember. We can only move forward.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Once you figure out what matters, you'll figure out how to be brave.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Everything you see is in the past, as far as you’re concerned. If you look up at the Moon, you’re seeing a little over a second ago. The Sun is more than eight minutes in the past. And the stars you see in the night sky are deep in the past, from just a few years to millennia.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Here in the U.S., the language we use to discuss immigration does not recognize the realities of our lives based on conditions that we did not create and cannot control. For the most part, why are white people called “expats” while people of color are called “immigrants”? Why are some people called “expats” while others are called “immigrants”? What’s the difference between a “settler” and a “refugee”? Language itself is a barrier to information, a fortress against understanding the inalienable instinct of human beings to move.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History