Danielle Younge-Ullman > Quotes

“My demon is you. My best and worst is about you: how I need you and fear for you, how I fear for myself if I lose you, how I have let myself be defined by you.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman , Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“Nothing guarantees happiness. I’m not certain happiness should be the goal. Satisfaction, maybe. A sense of purpose. Contribution. Authenticity. Happiness? It’s a lightweight goal. And meanwhile, I suspect that turning away from yourself will guarantee the opposite of happiness.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“I wonder whether I will ever breathe air that is clear of his ghost.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Falling Under

“I'm the parent. It's my job to be here for you, not the other way around.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“Certain memories, certain thoughts,are holes...holes ripped in you, through which precious things escape and leave you wanting, needing, gaping open. Laughter and belonging and comfort gush out, leaving their tracks but not their substance.
And you are left empty, a skeleton,a shell with wind rushing through you and a sensation of sinking, barely existing...”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Falling Under

“The distance grew between us, thickening like an all-day fog, until we were both so well versed in our new roles as people who didn't matter to each other that it was impossible to break through.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“We're all liars about something.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“I want to live. I want to sing, and tell stories and be connected with something larger than myself. I want to give everything I have, even if it hurts, even if it leaves me beaten down and hollowed out. I want it.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“Even if you can't change the external situation, you can change how you're experiencing it.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“Because this is the love I want. This is a good love, a love that could be right. And if I accept it,if I give back to him what is in me to give, I will have purchased him with my soul. My soul, that has been broken and cobbled back together, with some of the pieces not quite fitting right. And though I believe in time healing these things, still, I do not love with lightness...”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Falling Under

“Every action, or lack of action, takes a decision. And a decision takes energy. And every bit of energy taken in making decisions about stupid things takes energy from the important things.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“It was the best feeling in the worst moment.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“I’m in the middle of an epiphany—a shitty one. And the revelations don’t arrive in straight, clear lines, they come like cyclones, like explosions.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, He Must Like You

“Where is it supposed to go when you move on from it?”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“The number of unfair things in the world seems to multiply by the day, or maybe it's just my awareness of these things that's multiplying. Regardless, it's frustrating not being able to do anything about it.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, He Must Like You

“Traumatized doesn't mean broken.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, He Must Like You

“Jin rejoins us, and we march on. There are tears streaming down my face now, along with the sweat. They're from the physical pain. They're from all the pain. Sometime since we started across, every last shred of my inner fortification has burned away and i feel everything; all the memories, all of my pushed-down, blocked-out joys and sorrows and regrets lick up and down my insides, matching the searing of my muscles, the agony of a forest burned to the ground, the awfulness of the mother and baby raccoons. I weep and walk and climb and stumble, and my arms and shoulders and abs and back and legs and feet scream.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“You could just go for 'not horrible' and consider it done.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

“If you are touched wrong, if you are brought out and touched when you are not strong, when you do not have the dark of the attic corner, the walls at your back to save you…anyone who touches you can hurt you.”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Falling Under

“If you deceive someone for their own good, how can any real good come from it?”
― Danielle Younge-Ullman, Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined