January's Well-Read Quotes

An ever-updating list of the quotes that made me stop and think this month.

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"Ask me about my life as a sexualized, gendered body, and I can you tales. Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as usual, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk and fucked up. Again. Here are the scars. I am a swimmer. My shoulders are broad. My eyes, are blue.

Ask me about writing, well, that's a fierce private. Writing, she is the fire of me. Where stories get born from that place where life or death happened to me. She carries me and will be the death of me."

The Chronology of Water: Lidia Yuknavitch

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"Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. 'I'm okay' we say. 'I'm alright.' But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you just can't get it off. That's when you realize it isn't even an answer - it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced."

The Book Thief: Markus Zusak

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"We were each other's chrysalis love, we grew together until we couldn't grow together any more."

One Day in December: Josie Silver

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"'I've known a lot of whores in my life,' added Gore, running his hand along the red bathrobe that hung on the bedroom door before stepping outside into the corridor. 'Both men and women. And in general, I've always found them to be good company, with a highly evolved sense of honor. A whore will never cheat you, they have too much integrity for that. But you, Mr. Swift, you give the profession a bad name.'"

A Ladder to the Sky: John Boyne

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"Anything was better than what we felt. We had shame, so much shame at being the few survivors. Other survivors, if they exist, must also feel this way. We were ashamed of leaving people behind, of taking our comforts where we could find them, of stealing from those who could not defend themselves. We had known ourselves to be cowards and hypocrites, pernicious liars really, and to find the suspicion confirmed was not a relief but a horror. If the End was Nature's way of punishing us so that we might once again know our place, then yes, we knew it. If it was at all unclear before, it was not now."

Severance: Ling Ma

Keep Reading,

L.S.