2023 in Quotes

All the quotes I collected in 2023.

The Dragon Republic by R. F. Kuang

• No wonder they had won converts over so easily during occupation. What a relief it would be to know that at the end of this life there was a better one, that perhaps upon death you might enjoy the comforts you had always been denied instead of fading away from an indifferent universe. What a relief to know that the world was supposed to make sense, and that if it didn't, you would one day be justly compensated.

• Or maybe, she thought, with stars this bright, if you believed that above you lay the cosmos, then you had to construct a yurt to provide some temporary feeling of materiality. Otherwise, under the weight of swirling divinity, you might feel you had no significance at all.
  

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

• I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

• Perhaps that is what it is like being with other people. Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.

Senile Ascends by Josiah Bancroft

• We have society, but we are alone. We have light, but we have no sun. The Tower sucks our life and gives us only a little diversion and a little death. Do not accept a little death! Demand a great, booming demise!

• Mirrors are not so honest as one might think. They can be mugged at, bargained with, and one can always ferret out a flattering angle. Really, there is nothing like the expression of a long-lost friend to reflect the honest state of your affairs.

• I'm glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don't stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don't draw equations, our consciences don't have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us.

• Most life in the ocean lives in the shallows. And so it is with those living on the land.

• I'd rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.

Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov

• Which of the two has declared his love for her she doesn’t know, but apparently it makes no difference to her; whichever vessel she drinks from makes no difference to her, so along as she gets drunk.

• The love of humanity is a stick with two ends.

• "Both are equally immoral," observed one of the guests, "because they have one and the same goal to take away life. The state isn't God. It has no right to take away what it cannot give back if it wants to."

• Pyott Mikhailych rode along the bank of the pond and gazed sorrowfully at the water, and, looking back on his life, was becoming convinced that up to then he had always said and done what he did not think, and people had repaid him in kind, and therefore the whole of life now looked to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was reflected and waterweeds were entangled. And it seemed to him that it could not be set right.
  

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

• He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

• Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

• At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.

• "Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can," she said to him, "because these things don't last your whole life."

• He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

• It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love of not.

• "We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice," he had once said to her. "But when a woman decides to sleep wish a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”
  

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

• Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine, but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power unjustly and cruelly used - not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.

• But the monotonous life led by invalids often makes them like children, inasmuch as they have neither of them any sense of proportion in events, and seem each to believe that the walls and curtains which shut in their world, and shut out everything else, must of necessity be larger than anything hidden beyond.

• Margaret did not think of anything that might be utterly unreasonable in this speech: we do not look for reason or logic in the passionate entreaties of those who are sick unto death; we are stung with the recollection of a thousand slighted opportunities of fulfilling the wishes of those who will soon pass away from among us; and do they ask us for the future happiness of our lives, we lay it at their feet, and will it away from us.

• "It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young. Afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive."

• That sky above me looks as though it could not change, and yet it will. I am so tired, so tired of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually.
  

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

• But-you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.

• But how can such courage be, and such faith in their own species? Very few things would teach such faith. The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

• It was not lost on me how different the circumstances were now. Here I was again, this time returned of my own free will, no longer scheming a wild escape into the dark but desperately hoping that a darkness would not come in.

• Her destiny was to shelter and to nurture, to stand calm and tall and shade whomever lay beneath, but at her base, there would always be a little axe, slowly striking at her trunk, slowly wearing her away.

• I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best- my father, Nami, and me had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads shed left behind to pull.

• 
  

• She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions.

• She had all knowledge of my being memorized. The time I was born, my unborn cravings, the first book I read. The formation of every characteristic. Every ailment and little victory. She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

• I wrote this book because the world can be harsh and terrible and often unforgiving. I wrote because there were times I did not feel like living. I wrote because the court system is slow as a snail, and victims are forced to spend so much time fighting, rather than spending their days creating, drawing, cooking. I wrote to expose the brutality of en-titlement, gender violence, and class privilege in our society. But I would be failing you if you walked away from this book untouched by human-ity, without seeing what I saw: those thousands of handwritten letters, the green-lipped fish at the bottom of the ocean, the winking court re-porter. All the small miracles that sustained me. We may spend half our time wandering around, wondering what we're even doing here, why it's worth the effort. But living is an incredible thing, just to have been here, to have felt, if only briefly, the volume and depth of others' empathy. I wrote, most of all, to tell you I have seen how good the world could be.

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei 

• When I was growing up, my father rarely talked about the past, because everything was shrouded in the thick fog of the dominant political narrative, and any inquiry into fact ran the risk of provoking a backlash too awful to contemplate. In satisfying the demands of the new order, the Chinese people suffered a withering of spiritual life and lost the ability to tell things as they had truly occurred.

• Memory was the a rope they could clutch as they made their way forward, or use to haul themselves back to days that had passed.

• Disaster tests people's endurance, but the real seismic rupture takes place deep in people's hearts stoic endurance is just what we see from the outside.