histsblog

[histsblog]

“What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Fragile Shelter,” In Other Words. 

[histsblog]

“Apa pun yang belum terjadi, bukanlah fakta - tapi prediksi dan asumsi. Kesimpulan hanya bisa dianggap sah jika dibuat seusai kejadian. Orang yang sok tahu dan sok benar sering mengabaikan hal ini.”

—

[histsblog]

“Manusia butuh dicerdaskan, bukan (semakin) dibingungkan. Diajak berpikir, bukan diperkeruh. Bermain dengan logika, bukan dengan pengaruh.”

—

[histsblog]

[histsblog]

“The daily life of kids was a strange one, she thought. You got hauled to various locations, dumped there, hauled out again at the end of the day. During the dump time, you formed your own little societies that might have little or nothing to do with your pecking order in your home life. So weren’t you constantly adjusting, readjusting, dealing with new rules, new authorities, more power, less? No wonder kids were weird.”

—

J.D. Robb, Salvation in Death

[histsblog]

“If we lived in a regular house, with one and a half bathrooms, I wondered, would she still hate me this much? Was resentment something that grew better in small spaces, like those flowers that Mom used to force to bloom inside in little vases?”

—

Danielle Paige, Dorothy Must Die

[histsblog]

“But it’s not enough to know right from wrong. You need the strength to do what’s right, even when what you want most in the world is the wrong thing.”

— Cinda Williams Chima, The Exiled Queen

[histsblog]

“I am here. I am in the present tense. I’m not always here, and sometimes here is a very difficult place. Sometimes it is a labyrinth, or a Minotaur, or a rope I can neither let go of nor follow. It’s hard to find the right words, but I guess I would say that it’s something like feeling the floor. And that it is my privilege to feel it.”

— Meg Howrey, The Cranes Dance

[histsblog]

“He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.”

—

Hannah Harrington, Saving June (via quoted-books)

reblogged as a favorite of lin-de-say

[histsblog]

“In the end, how [is] anyone any different from a ‘normal’ person? If you love someone, you love them. It doesn’t matter where they came from or if they’re a boy or a girl, or if you fight, or if they’re weird, or if they find it difficult to communicate with you; you just fucking love them.”

— Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

[histsblog]

“Inside, the lies you tell become the person you become. On the outside, sun and reality shrink people back to their actual size. In here, people grow into their shadows.”

— Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

[histsblog]

“Official justice does not dig deep, but regards what comes readily to the surface, and draws conclusions accordingly. A nagging doubt now and then is the price it pays for speedy order and a quiet land.”

— Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste For Bones

[histsblog]

“But money or no money we’re all searching for the same things aren’t we It doesn’t matter who you are or how much money you have. Love and happiness that’s what it’s all about”

— Jill Mansell, Millie’s Fling

[histsblog]

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”

— Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

[histsblog]

“However strenuously the world pulls us apart, however long the absence, we are not changed for being dashed upon the rocks. I knew you then, I know you now, I shall know you again when you come home.”

— Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale

[histsblog]

“Time passes. That’s the rule. No matter what happens, no matter how much it might feel like everything in your life has been frozen around one particular moment, time marches on.”

— Cynthia Hand, The Last Time We Say Goodbye

[histsblog]

“The best books, they don’t talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you’d always thought about, but that you didn’t think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you’re a little bit less alone in the world. You’re part of this cosmic community of people who’ve thought about this thing, whatever it happens to be.”

— Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up