Amy Koppelman > Quotes

“Resiliency, like a cartwheel, requires core strength and a disregard for gravity. Only one of which can be willed.”
― Amy Koppelman, Hesitation Wounds

“You know what happens when you feed the birds? They forget to fly south and freeze to death.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“Motivators, if that’s the right word, interest Laney. What motivates someone to do whatever. Not in the psychopharmacology sense. Sure, in her case it’s partly chemical. Some combination of a mood disorder, impulse control, alcoholism. Still, whatever the diagnosis, whatever the fuck any of it means, there’s no discounting she’s a liar. A good liar at that. When she’s not being offended, not”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“Belittling nostalgia is a frightened man's parlor trick. Be grateful for any prize. Even a paper fortress, albeit briefly, provides shelter from the rain.”
― Amy Koppelman, Hesitation Wounds

“Weather, she thinks, is impartial. You don’t need to be principled to enjoy a breezy day like this. You merely have to be alive.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“There are people like that, people who don’t beat themselves up, don’t take every little injustice personally. Those people, same callous fuckers that walk past a legless guy without a pause, those are the ones who win.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“A little into it they fucked for a kid. Squeezed one out. Couple years later fucked for another. Now she’s here. One more broad in a big-ass truck with the ring, the two kids, the latest cell phone.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“If her history has taught her anything it’s that hate, not love, is the more powerful of the two emotions. Anyway,”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“There is the world as it exists, and then, just next to it, the world one creates in order to exist. The boundaries limited only by ones imagination.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“If the castle is hope, memory is the moat that surrounds it.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“Desperation, not desire, is the root of atrocity.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“submission.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“There is the world as it exists, and then, just next to it, the world one creates in order to exist. The boundaries limited only by one’s imagination.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“People just don’t get it. Appearance is arbitrary. And if it’s not arbitrary the it’s compensation. Pretty face, ugly heart. Either way, it’s not something earned.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“Death is a manifestation, the complete and total embodiment of fear.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“If depression is darkness, then the child of depression grows up living in the shadow of that darkness. What we inherit - indiscriminate.”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“But then again a good person doesn’t cheat, doesn’t fuck around for sport. Good and bad, though, aren’t mutually exclusive are they? At least she didn’t, Laney rationalizes, at least she didn’t pretend that what she had with John, with any of the men, was more than it was. Didn’t fool herself into thinking she had any jurisdiction over their freedom. That the fucking had anything to do with”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back

“I was with a girlfriend of mine last night and we were talking about David Foster Wallace. "It's been three years since he killed himself," I said. And she said, "Yep." Waited a beat. "And he's still dead.”
― Amy Koppelman, Hesitation Wounds

“Whatever the motivation factor, the specific ratio of grief to cruelty is immaterial. i left Ray, without warning, as he slept. Out of sight isn't out of mind but it's out of the line of vision, which is something. Because you can keep quite busy like this. Moving forward.”
― Amy Koppelman

“Laney is thinking about this as Donny fucks her. It feels good getting fucked in the ass like this. The pain, a final and utter submission. No man, she thinks, can love a girl whose ass he fucked. Or even think he loves. Later,”
― Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back