Elizabeth Day > Quotes

“For so long, we woman have turned our anger inwards, redirecting it towards ourselves and allowing it to manifest as shame. We have told ourselves, instead, that we are sad or hormonal or stressed, but these have been placeholder emotions. And for so long we have been encouraged to do this by a misogynistic culture that realises female anger is dangerous not because it is the product of mental imbalance but because it is fuel. Female anger is power.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail

“That’s the problem with charm. It means you get away with stuff. It means you never have to develop a real character because no one remembers to look for one. They’re too busy basking in the glow of your attention. They’re too busy being impressed.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“I began to realise that if I never achieved anything outwardly ever again, I would still exist. The voice in my head is not who I am.”
― Elizabeth Day, Failosophy: A Handbook For When Things Go Wrong

“We’ve been told that success is to be known by others, when in truth the most meaningful success is to know ourselves.”
― Elizabeth Day, Failosophy: A Handbook For When Things Go Wrong

“The danger of the mind to trick one into thinking all the bad things we imagine are facts when in truth, they are just thoughts which are, in turn, a product of our experience. We exist separately from our thoughts.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail

“Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you is to cede control of who you are. It is to outsource your identity to a bunch of strangers who do not know you.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail

“One half of the table was arguing with the other half about the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, in that semi-detached, earnest way that moneyed people do, always safe in the knowledge no political outcome will really affect them.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“That there is no one on this big, wide planet who can understand the you-ness of you more than you.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

“Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking, into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail

“If you can remove your ego from a process, then there really isn't any difference between success and failure. They're just both parts of a process. And that you shouldn't look at a failure as something terrible, it just is what it is and you shouldn't look at success as something great, it just is what it is.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail

“If you treat yourself as high value, it turns out other people are more likely to do so as well.”
― Elizabeth Day

“As I’ve grown to understand myself better, I’ve also grown to know which are the friends I can truly rely on in times of crisis and who want the best for me”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

“the tragic flaw of parenthood is that you equip your child to leave you.”
― Elizabeth Day, Magpie

“Adventures do by definition involve risk, but not having an adventure means missing out on life, a far greater risk.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail

“joint opposition to something can be almost as unifying as mutual passion.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“Being honest and publicly vulnerable is not the only way to be, but it's certainly a brave and deeply humane way to be.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail

“Like every conventional woman, Lucy likes to pretend she is unconventional by buying attention-seeking shoes.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“A friend has not made a commitment, has not signed a contract or walked down the aisle and promised to love you until death do you part. A friend does not need to do anything or be anyone in order to make you feel better about yourself. Of course, the greatest friends do this anyway, but it is not their job and you should not expect it of them.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

“People you considered the closest, most loyal, most intimate allies, will drift away from you and quite often, you won’t know why.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

“they had to adapt their dreams, to cut the starry cloth of their imaginings to fit the circumstance of their reality,”
― Elizabeth Day, Magpie

“That made me look like a boy who didn’t have a home full of packed bookshelves but who instead relied on his mother’s Reader’s Digest for reading material.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“A false friend is like a shadow: when the sun shines on you, you can't get rid of him, but when clouds gather over you, he is nowhere to be seen”
― Elizabeth Day, Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

“Don’t be silly. It’s lovely to have someone normal here.’ What a strange thing to say to me, I thought. I’m the least normal person I know.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“But other people’s money has a narcotic quality. It makes you high. It makes you forget your misgivings. You feel privileged, somehow exceptional to have been invited, as though the tiniest fleck of gold leaf from a giant glittering statue has smudged off on you and you can kid yourself you belong. That you are, for a single night, indubitably One of Them.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“That’s not to say forward planning is pointless, but unless you can actively contribute something practical towards your future growth right now, there’s no point worrying about the things you can’t yet control.”
― Elizabeth Day, Failosophy: A Handbook For When Things Go Wrong

“It turns out I wasn't just passionate about friendship: I was addicted to it. I had a physical and emotional dependence. I had an urge to pursue it, even when it came at a damaging cost to my own peace of mind. I was, in short, a friendaholic.”
― Elizabeth Day, Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

“you know that no matter how many months have passed since the last occasion you met in person, real friendship should exist in an alternative space–time continuum which can be tapped into whenever necessary without any judgement being placed on either party.”
― Elizabeth Day, How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

“She was of a different time. Part of her still is. I have never worked out which time, exactly. It could be that the one she belongs to hasn’t been invented yet.”
― Elizabeth Day, The Party

“What must it feel like to be so calmly confident about one’s place in the world? To not have to try to make people love you?”
― Elizabeth Day, Magpie

“If I let Becca back into my life, I wouldn't be as good a friend to Sathnam. I would have less time for him, yes, but it was more than that. Emotional resources can be finite too. My relationship with him would carry less weight because how can he trust me if, in my desperation to accumulate friends and never let them go, I spread my love so thinly, and allow myself to be treated to badly, with so few boundaries, that the act of my friendship itself carried no meaning.”
― Elizabeth Day, Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict