Emily Carpenter > Quotes

“Shy don’t set the world on fire,”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“You understand, don’t you,” he said gently, “that sometimes people hide certain facets of who they are, who they were, from the people they love? Not because they’re willfully trying to hurt them, but simply”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“How to explain grief to someone who’s never experienced it? It’s like a cross between a panic attack and a case of acute appendicitis, only it happens all over your body.”
― Emily Carpenter, Until the Day I Die

“Trust me on this. People may die. Hatred doesn’t.”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“There are monsters all around us—people who have to hide because the world can’t bear to see them for who they truly are.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“Sometimes, in our lives, we do what other people want us to. Simply because we can’t muster the strength to go another, braver way.”
― Emily Carpenter, The Weight of Lies

“She could keep her own counsel and let her mama settle things for herself. Her”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“I may win governor, but can you imagine what it’s going to take for a man with a murdering white supremacist in his bloodline to get into the White House?”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“H.A.L.T., I reminded myself. Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired. It was one of those Twelve Step clichés they’d endlessly repeated in treatment. Well, I was definitely all four of those. Which meant I needed to stop whatever it was I was doing and take care of myself.”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“Shy don’t set the world on fire.”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“I marveled how people managed to work surrounded by all this expansive light and heat and humidity. It felt like I’d stepped into a Southern gothic novel, and all I wanted to do was sit my ass on a rocking chair and drink something cool.”
― Emily Carpenter, The Weight of Lies

“was quiet a moment. I had the crazy thought that the words of the story, when I let them out, would cut me. But that was nonsense, wasn’t it? Speaking words didn’t hurt; it was keeping them in that did that.”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“You're saying our darkness is what gives us strength." He nodded "It's our beauty.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“Robb was hosting her garden club. Since I was gone and”
― Emily Carpenter, Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

“Sometimes the best people have the hardest shells to crack.”
― Emily Carpenter, The Weight of Lies

“instead of believing in God, I fastened all my hopes on the frail, imperfect humans around me. Or rather, one human. And when he left me, I was lost.”
― Emily Carpenter, Until the Day I Die

“That the past was like the surface of a crazy mirror. When you spoke certain things aloud, when they left your mouth, they changed. The words became either oddly magnified—blown out of proportion—or squeezed down to nothing. Right could appear wrong, good could look like evil, depending on the spin. No one talked about their past without things getting distorted—and without consequences. There were always consequences.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson (Shorie’s letter?)”
― Emily Carpenter, Until the Day I Die

“The point is, there are unsolvable problems that even the most brilliant among us can’t resolve. They’re in math but also science, philosophy, and art. Everywhere. So why, then, is it that we can’t accept unsolvable problems in human psychology? You can talk about your disagreements with the person that you love until your throats are raw. But it won’t change anything. And it won’t ensure a happily-ever-after.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“Jung called it bringing the shadow to the conscious self, an essential part of achieving wholeness. One can’t deal with a problem they can’t articulate. But after that, after you see it for what it is, you must decide how you want to handle it.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“It’s from the field of algebra. The wild problem is an unsolvable equation or concept involving classification and graphs and something called a quiver, which I’m not even going to begin to pretend I can explain.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“The curate might set as many chapters as he pleased for Catherine to get by heart, and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till his arm ached; they forgot everything the minute they were together again . . . Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“beige lipstick, and bright-blue eyelash extensions. College student, probably.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“The trick to constructing an unassailable relationship is to embrace the unsolvable.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“You can pull it close, wrap your arms around it, embrace the anathema you’ve been led to believe by all the experts and book peddlers and TED Talkers that you should erase.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret

“You do this—you embrace the darkness, the treasure of the shadow—until the lines between you and it dissolve and it becomes an ally. Perhaps even an asset.”
― Emily Carpenter, Every Single Secret