Jane > Jane's Quotes

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“But I lack formal education. So I’m left with the feeling that I’m smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people—people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin—that they’d be bored as hell by me. It’s a lonely way to go through life.”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“Books may be temporary; dicks are forever.”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“People are dumb. I’ll never get over how dumb people are.”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“Honestly, if you were any slower, you’d be going backward.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“I'll take crazy over stupid any day.”
― Joss Whedon

“Stupidity isn't punishable by death. If it was, there would be a hell of a population drop.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse

“But I wasn't a well-read bookworm; I was just a dumb whore in the right library.”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“She is an incredibly intelligent idiot”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“And he paddled away in his douche canoe.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.”
― Joe Hill, Locke & Key, Vol. 3: Crown of Shadows

“Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld

“You have my whole heart. You always did.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“If only my heart were stone.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road