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“You cannot open a book without learning something” —Confucius

[books-n-quotes]

“Truth only means something when it’s hard to admit.”

— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song (via books-n-quotes)

[books-n-quotes]

“People fall in and out of love all the time, don’t they? I wonder how they manage it.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon (via books-n-quotes)

[booksforthemad]

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

—Zora Neale Hurston / How It Feels To Be Colored Me

[booksforthemad]

“At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”

—The Hate U Give // Angie Thomas

[booksforthemad]

“But boys will be boys, our favorite phrase that excuses so many things, while the only thing we have for the opposite gender is women, said with disdain and punctuated with an eye roll.”

—The Female Species // Mindy McGinnis

[booksforthemad]

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

—The Unbearable Lightness Of Being / / Milan Kundera

[booksforthemad]

“It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody. I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especially me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and than make the choice to share it with other people. You can't just sit their and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. And I'm going to figure out what that is.

And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn't do or what they didn't know. I don't know. I guess there could always be someone to blame. It's just different. Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Because it's okay to feel things. I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. I feel infinite.”

—Perks Of Being a Wallfower // Stephen Chbosky

[booksforthemad]

“The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.”

- Turtles All The Way Down // John Green

[books-n-quotes]

“When life sucks, throw yourself into art.”

— Monica Drake, Clown Girl

[wordsnquotes]

“A bird is safe in its nest - but that is not what its wings are made for.”

— Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird

[books-n-quotes]

“You have to get lost before you find yourself.”

— John Green, Paper Towns

[booksforthemad]

Girl in Pieces // Kathleen Glasgow

[booksforthemad]

felt the need to bring this back. if you are struggling, do not do it alone. there are people like you, people who’ve been in these conditions. reach out to them.

[booksforthemad]

“It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.”

- Turtles All The Way Down // John Green

[poemswords]

[booksforthemad]

I just want to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your own body?

- Girl In Pieces // Kathleen Glasgow

[booksforthemad]

Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.

- Girl In Pieces // Kathleen Glasgow You guys seemed to like the other quote from this book, so I'm posting more of them 🙇‍♀️

[booksforthemad]

Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That's the part of the risk. I don't want to be scared anymore.

- To All The Boys I've Loved Before // Jenny Han