Lauren Bachman > Lauren's Quotes

“It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It is impossible to believe that any of us ever looked like children. I understand, of course, that we were once children. The cloak of time has yet to grow so long that I have surrendered my childhood.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Death isn't the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It is easiest to measure the distance between where I am and where I want to be in miles, in minutes. It is unfair to measure such distance in heartbreak, in loneliness.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“If there is a heaven, I suppose there we can weep over the scrapbook of our lives while we wait for the living to climb the constellations.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“It's very hard to unbelieve stuff from when you were little, isn't it? So hard to shake off the stories we were raised on.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“All women write stories. It’s just that only some transcribe them.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“We’re the same thing,' I say, feeling something deep in the pit of my stomach in that moment and not knowing how else to articulate it. Now I’d say this: There’s an invisible artery joining the hearts of mothers and daughters through which pain is transferred from one generation to the next. Maybe it's the same for fathers and sons, I wouldn't know. But I don't have those words then, so I say the ones I do have again: 'We're the same, Mom.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“Life really becomes an accumulation of losses, but this is something I hope you never have to learn.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“I want to be part of everything. Like when I read a book or see a movie, I move in.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“Do you follow your destiny or your heart when they aren’t one and the same?
Which pull is stronger?”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“A real love story is not falling in love once, but again and again through all sorts of incarnations.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“Did you know that the atoms in human bodies are billions of years old, some as old as the Big Bang, and so we're literally stardust, which means you, me, and everyone who's ever lived is made of this... I don't know, this elemental brightness. Like we are the stars. We are made of their light. We are light.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“Maybe you can't hang on to people, but my, how we hang on to our love for them, or it hangs on to us.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“I do believe now that when the world tips over, joy spills out with all the sorrows. But you have to look for it.”
― Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over

“The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. […] So the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“...And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or - if death is a journey to another place - that you will not see him again?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar