Wendy Walker > Quotes

“I think there are two types of people. Ones who have a scream inside them and ones who don’t. People who have a scream are too angry or too sad or laugh too hard, swear too much, use drugs or never sit still. Sometimes they sing at the top of their lungs with the windows rolled down. I don’t think people are born with it. I think other people put it inside you with the things they do to you, and say to you, or the things you see them do or say to other people. And I don’t think you can get rid of it. If you don’t have a scream, you can’t understand.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“I think there are two types of people. Ones who have a scream inside them and ones who don’t.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“The truth is, nothing really matters unless we decide it matters.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Sometimes you can win a war by leaving the battlefield before your army gets killed.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“According to the Greek myth, Narcissus was a hunter who was exceptionally beautiful and proud. He was so proud, in fact, that he rejected anyone who tried to love him. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, decided to punish Narcissus. She lured him to a pool of water where he was able to see his own reflection. He fell madly in love with himself and stared at his reflection until he died.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“Sorry happens after something bad has happened, after people have let it happen. It had become contemptuous to me, all these I’m-so-sorries.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“I tell my young patients, and my own children, that this is not their life. Not yet. What they are doing now is building a house. It is a house they will have to live in for the rest of their lives, so they’d better get it right. They will be able to remodel, redecorate, and repair. But they can never rebuild. Everything they put into this house, every emotional scar from a bad relationship, every sexual perversion they give in to, every opportunity they secure for themselves, every drug they allow to interrupt the maturing of their growing brains, will be forever in the foundation of that house.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“People could hide. And hide well. Even the people you love the most.”
― Wendy Walker, The Night Before

“No matter where we are and what we are subjected to, we will eventually settle into the new reality and try to find pleasure, even if it is nothing more than a warm shower or food or even a glass of water.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“If there was fault, then there could also be prevention, the illusion of control to make life bearable.”
― Wendy Walker, Don't Look for Me

“With youth comes the inability to know what’s going to happen as a decision is played out. It is one of the greatest shames of the human experience that by the time we know how to conduct ourselves in an appropriate manner, there’s little conducting left to do.”
― Wendy Walker

“White lies, black lies, a million lies a million times every day, everywhere, by every one of us. We are all hiding something from someone. This”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy. Yes, we will come to learn that our clay giraffes were not masterly. But when we pull them out of our attics, they should make us cry, knowing that when our parents saw these ugly pieces of plaster, they felt ridiculously misplaced pride, and they wanted to hug us until our bones hurt. This is what we need from our parents, more than the truth about how small we are. We will have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“It’s a big responsibility to be a parent. To know what to say and what not to say. Kids are blank slates, and everything we draw on them stays forever.”
― Wendy Walker, The Night Before

“It requires far more strength to experience emotion than to suppress it.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Reading parenting books—and all self-help books, as far as I’m concerned—is the equivalent of learning math from a dog.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“have so many memories from growing up in this town. They’ve been crawling out from every corner since the day I returned.”
― Wendy Walker, The Night Before

“Walking away is a bad habit, but it is a habit and it’s hard to break.”
― Wendy Walker, The Night Before

“Rosie stopped at the top of the stairs and let the memory play on. Cheep”
― Wendy Walker, The Night Before

“It’s so easy to think that we are important and that the things that happen to us are important. But the truth is, we are so small, so insignificant in the scope of even just our solar system, which is itself meaningless in the scope of the Universe. The truth is, nothing really matters unless we decide it matters.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“An instinct may explain a reaction. But that does not mean the reaction”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“years: You. Your spouse. Your child. Your friends. The people who love you. The people who hate you. Terrorists in the Middle East. The politicians raising your taxes and making bad policies. The teacher who gave your son a bad grade. The couple who didn’t invite you to a dinner. I have gone down this mental path when things have upset me. I find it puts life in perspective. It can be a good thing, to remember that there is very little that truly matters. A bad grade. A dumb politician. A social slight. Unfortunately, there are things that do matter. Things that can ruin what little time we have here. Things that cannot be done over or remedied. These are the things that we regret. And regret is more devious than guilt. It is more corrosive than envy. And it is more powerful than fear.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Empathy is defined this way: “the ability to share and understand the feelings of another.” Women talking for hours at a lunch. Men walking the golf course together every Sunday morning. Teenage girls glued to their phones. This is when we tell our stories, sometimes in meticulous detail, watch the expressions in others as they take in the words. We extract from them their sympathy, their joy, their understanding. We do this so we are not alone as we walk slowly toward our death. Empathy is at the very core of our humanity. Life is pain without it.”
― Wendy Walker, All Is Not Forgotten

“Rule Number Ten: Impulsive behavior happens when the emotional brain hijacks the thinking brain.”
― Wendy Walker, American Girl

“That was the first time she’d felt them—the hollow spaces. The emptiness that would not fill up. Not with anything.”
― Wendy Walker, Don't Look for Me

“In plain words, she described the symptoms: grandiose sense of self-importance; fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, brilliance; requiring excessive admiration; elevated sense of entitlement; takes advantage of others to achieve their own ends; lacks empathy; unwilling to recognize or identify needs and feelings of others.”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night

“But like every other human defect, we have used science to outsmart our own biology. We can take a brain that is shredded ear to ear and we can put it back together with mantras like this one. Mantras that have been tested in clinical trials. Vetted in peer articles and TED Talks and now appear in self-help books. You just put one foot in front of the other, Molly. Every day, just one more step.”
― Wendy Walker, Don't Look for Me

“Maybe there’s no difference between wanting and needing. I”
― Wendy Walker, Emma in the Night