Coco Mellors > Quotes

“When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“People are like this too, you know,” he says eventually. “We break. We put ourselves back together. The cracks are the best part. You don’t have to hide them.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“Fondness was the best word she could think of to describe what they felt for each other. Fondness was warm but not tepid, the color of amber, more affectionate than friendship but less complicated than love.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure. Maybe they’re not as shiny or successful as you and I feel we have to be. But it’s not because they’re not interesting. They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“I'm so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness....Sometimes I'm so lonely I'm not even on that map.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“But what they don’t know is this: As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“The hole is loneliness,' said Cleo quietly.
'Why's that?' said Audrey,
'You can't stand above someone and tell them to get out of it,' she said. 'Or teach or preach it out of them. You have to be in it with them.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“Avery had previously thought love was built on large, visible gestures, but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of ordinary, almost inconsequential, acts of daily devotion—washing the mugs left in the sink before bed, taking the time to run up or downstairs to kiss each other quickly before one left the house, cutting up an extra piece of fruit to share—acts easy to miss, but if ever gone, deeply missed.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I think you're the opposite of insufferable, I suffer you gladly.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“She’d learned early that it was quicker to bond with another person over what you didn’t like than what you did, and that the easiest way to feel close to someone was to do something transgressive together. That’s why smokers always made friends.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“He was the only man in the house, but he
also was the house. They lived inside his moods.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Fun was fine when you were young, but as you got older it was kindness that counted, kindness that showed up.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“I need to make money. I need to write today. I need to clean the bathroom. I need to eat something. I need to quit sugar. I need to cut my hair. I need to call Verizon. I need to savor the moment. I need to find the library card. I need to learn to meditate. I need to try harder. I need to get that stain out. I need to find better health insurance. I need to discover my signature scent. I need to strengthen and tone. I need to be present in the moment. I need to learn French. I need to be easier on myself. I need to buy organizational storage units. I need to call back. I need to develop a relationship with a God of my understanding.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“And you’re in love?” “Ma, we’ve never even kissed.” “And that has anything to do with it?” “Okay, fine. Yes, I think so. But don’t tell anyone. Don’t even repeat it to yourself.” “Why?” “Because it’s humiliating.” “Sweetheart, love is humiliating. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?” “Who would have told me that?” “Do you know the word humiliate comes from the Latin root humus , which means ‘earth’? That’s how love is supposed to feel.” “Like hummus?” “Like earth. It ground s you. All this nonsense about love being a drug, making you feel high, that’s not real. It should hold you like the earth.” “Wow, Ma.” “What? I have a heart, don’t I?”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“believe in nothing but a woman’s capacity to survive disappointment”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“We want because we’re wanting . Both senses of the word. The lacking and the longing, all rolled into one. The more you find yourself wanting, the more you want.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“Their family had always been good at hellos and goodbyes, moments ending even as they began. It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I don't understand this obsession with happiness," she said. "Happiness is like the Hollywood sign. It's big, it's unattainable, and even if you do make it up there, what's there to do but come back down?”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“I believe that everything happens,” she said. “Period. Or full stop, as you would say. That’s it. Things happen and we have to learn to live with them, as long as suicide is off the table, that is. If we can find meaning in them, fine, but even if we can’t, we still have to live with them. The meaning is an afterthought, an anesthesia. Happens is the only word in that statement that’s empirical. The rest is whatever helps you sleep at night.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“You are not that important.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Everyone I know is either more successful or more interesting than me. This realization is nothing new. In fact, it used to feel like everyone I didn’t know was more successful and interesting than me too. I still remember the sensation of watching a talent show on TV as a child and realizing that the girl dancing was a whole year younger than me. She was wearing a red sequin dress and patent tap shoes. She looked like a ruby, a human jewel spinning across the stage. I was in my pajamas from T.J. Maxx eating cereal for dinner, already destined for a life of mediocrity. Why didn’t I just pull myself together back then? I was five! I could have turned it around!”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“They say you don’t know your principles until they become inconvenient to you,”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“He became the hook upon which she hung her whole self.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“What a thing it must be to be indifferent to indifference.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other....”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“It is good you have each other, the artist had said, regarding them
seriously as she worked. You never have to explain yourself to sisters.
It was true. Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of
something magic. Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up
of fours. The seasons. The elements. The points on a compass. Four suits in
a pack of cards. Four chambers of a human heart. Bonnie loved being a part
of this mystical number, this perfect symmetry of two sets of two.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters