cleo > cleo's Quotes

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”
― Jenny Slate

“Well, I am so sensitive and I am very fragile but so is everything else, and living with a dangerous amount of sensitivity is sort of what I have to do sometimes, and it is so very much better than living with no gusto at all. And I’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Now I see why reading was illegal for black people during slavery. I discover that I think in words. The more words I know, the more things I can think about....Reading was illegal because if you limit someone's vocab, you limit their thoughts. They can't even think of freedom because they don't have the language to.”
― M.K. Asante, Buck: A Memoir

“No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff

“Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff

“It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.”
― Ryu Murakami , Audition

“And you understood what She meant to us. People once called us monsters and freaks, too, but I think we were beautiful freaks, weren’t we? Just like Her.”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“Amanda spots two breasts poking out of its hair-covered torso with a perkiness that for a fleeting moment reminds her of the nude Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra from Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour”
― Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“Too weird to live, too rare to die!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“I lay in bed and thought about how easy it was to hurt a person. It didn't have to be physical. All you had to do was take a good hard kick at something they cared about.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“We were just kids. We were property. We belonged to our parents, body and soul. It meant we were doomed in the face of any real danger from the adult world and that meant hopelessness, and humiliation and anger.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.' If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one's undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I lover her very much?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“You’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“A dreamer,” scorns her mother.

“A dreamer,” mourns her father.

“A dreamer,” warns Estele.

Still, it does not seem such a bad word.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Bubbly is bogus.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Pretties

“At least one thing was consistent about her life: It just kept on getting more complicated.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Pretties

“[I]t has been one long desolation, one long hungry season since the other people came and took the land and the language and the very lives of the people. A hungry season, even for It.”
― Phoenix Boudreau, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

“I’ve had many names, none of which you would recognize. I am the Night Mother. I am the last, wet gasp of a punctured lung. I am the quiet sound of blood cooling in dead veins. I am the end of all things, and all things that end are my domain.”
― Norris Black, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

“Are you a bad person, or do you just have reasonable concerns, are you a bad person, or are you just asking questions? In the crushed heat death you ask how to win a culture war, and when does a culture war become a real war, where is the line that is crossed, is it the spilling of blood and has blood already spilled? It must be a war to be called a war.”
― Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless

“Every spot on the planet has something in its past that is worth haunting about.”
― Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless

“And the world comes crashing down around them. Maybe they'll be okay. Do you think they'll be okay, in the end? I think they will be. I have to think they will be.”
― Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless

“I have to know that there are people who would understand if I talked to them. I have to know. I have to believe that my trauma is relatable, if controversial, that there are people who would listen to me and go, it’s okay Alice, it’s completely okay. You are so fucking normal. Everything you’ve experienced is normal.”
― Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters