Quote Collection 📙

“Wealth is a nightmare. With each cherished thing we buy, we lose a thing we dream about."―Kafka Asagiri, Bungo Stray Dogs

“That night under the peach blossom tree, we made a vow.” —Gene Luen Yang, Boxers and Saints

“There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.” —Baldwin, No Name in the Street

“Who the hell is James Baldwin?” —George Santos

“To say we must be free of air, while admitting to knowing no other source of breath, is what I have tried to do here.” —Frank Wilderson III, Red, White & Black

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen

“The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.” ―Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.” ―Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Tell me, at what velocity does joy travel?” ―Clint Smith, Counting Descent

“Come help me bottle autumn’s setting sun, we’ll tuck away glass jars of dying rays.” ―Crystal Zhang

“My relationship to English is one that the language never anticipated would occur.” ―Chen Chen

“What more is there to say but to ask softly, ‘Oh―you’re here too?’” ―Eileen Chang, “Love”

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be." —Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”

“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.” ― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“It is the irony of a ship burning at sea, surrounded by the very thing that could save us.” ―Clint Smith, Counting Descent

“This is about hope, sure, but not in the way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning.” ―Hanif Abdurraqib

“Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.” ―Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“People, unlike trees, thrive by relocation."―Chenhao Tan

“The ideas of racecraft are… social facts―like six o ‘clock, both an idea and a reality.” ―Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft

“Gon, you are light. Sometimes, you shine so brightly, I must look away. But even so, is it still okay if I stay at your side?” Yoshihiro Togashi, Hunter x Hunter

“SOONJA: ‘Oh? What is a grandma like?’ DAVID: ‘They make cookies! They say nice things! They don’t wear men’s underwear!’” ―Lee Isaac Chung, Minari

“Just got back from the centrist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people holding hands and chanting ‘Better things aren’t possible.’” ―Internet Hippo

“When we hold each other in our humanity, what other outcome could there be? Vengeance is not justice.” ―Mariame Kaba

“looking for open heart surgery without the knife” ―Haki R. Madhubuti

“A certain man once told me that writing novels is writing people. You cannot write about someone’s life after you rob them of it. That’s why I will never kill again.” ―Kafka Asagiri, Bungo Stray Dogs

“You ain’t got infinite wiggles.” ―Kevin Garnett

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” ―Louise Glück

“The music disappears like it’s been swallowed up by quicksand. I yank off my headphones and listen. Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.” ―Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“We should be so close to each other to make it not only unnecessary to write letters, but the excessive closeness would even make it impossible to speak.” ―Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer, December 24, 1912

“the tree we have never been able to climb / because we are kids / but now we are kids who just watched Indiana Jones” ―Phil Kaye, Date and Time

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” ―Jean-Luc Godard

“When you’re not thinking of anything good and anything bad, at that moment, what is your original face?” ―Huineng

““Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” ―Brian Eno

“Jet-lagged and sleepless, we’d snack on homemade banchan in the blue dark of Grandma’s humid kitchen while my rela­tives slept.” ―Michelle Zauner

“And one day five summers ago, when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, which you paid for with your last damn dime, because you once overheard me say that I liked it."―Matthew Olzmann

“You can’t un-saw a tree. But you can’t unsee one either.” ―John Green, “The Broccoli Tree”

“I have met many men who were more learned in their philosophising, but their philosophy remained, as it were, external to them. Wanting to know more than other people, they studied the workings of the universe, as they might have studied some machine they had come across, out of sheer curiosity. They studied human nature, in order to speak knowledgeably about it, not in order to know themselves.” ―Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

“You know, Jin, I would’ve saved myself from five hundred years’ imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey.” ―Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

“Everything has changed on the surface and nothing else has been touched… In a way, the state is more powerful than ever, because it has given us so many tokens.” ―Baldwin, I Heard it Through the Grapevine

“If I love my friends, I’m going to tell them. There’s no reason to hold back. The world needs a little more love in general.”