Amanda Davee > Amanda's Quotes

“am a person who trusts data and loves information and feels soothed by sorting things. I’m a person who sees cause for delight everywhere but can’t stop noticing danger everywhere, too, and who often struggles to reconcile the two. I’m a person who takes every personality test despite knowing her own personality very well, and then retakes them until she gets the label she wants.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives

“See, most people have plenty of private things out in the open if you know where and how to look, and I do”
― Rachel Koller Croft, Stone Cold Fox

“I always knew what men wanted to hear, the setting never mattered, and specifically in business, the playbook was so abundantly clear. Sexism goes in and out of vogue depending on the year or damning article making the rounds in the press, but the deep-seated sentiments never change.”
― Rachel Koller Croft, Stone Cold Fox

“You’re depressed, not crazy. It’s not insane to be depressed in this world. It’s more sane than being happy. I never trust those upbeat individuals who grin no matter what’s going on. Those are the ones with a screw loose, if you ask me.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn't yet whoever she was becoming.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“When an old person dies,” Kent said, “even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They’re like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked over.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie had read somewhere that the more times a story was told, the less accurate it became. Humans were prone to exaggeration; they leaned away from the parts of the narrative they found boring and leaned into the exciting spots. Details and timelines changed over years of repetition. The story became more myth and less true. Sylvie thought about how she and William rarely told their story and felt pleased; by not being shared, their love story remained intact.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“that just because you never thought about someone didn’t mean they weren’t inside you.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She wondered if dying was simply going to be an exercise in letting go of one thing after another.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She existed outside her own body-she was scattered across this ground-but somehow this made her feel less vulnerable. She was painted into this family, mirrored in her father's face. She was more abundant than she'd believed possible.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“He’s not ambitious. He never knew what to do, so he wanted me to give him instructions for everything, big and small. I’m a fast walker, and he’s slow. I thought I needed a husband, because that’s what we were told as little girls, right? Or maybe not told but shown. It didn’t occur to me that I might be better on my own. I was carrying him,”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“But Carrie had told her friend once, during high school, not to model herself on Julia. "I like your mom a lot," Carrie had said, "but anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She's trying to hide all her messiness, and I want better than that for you.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The thing was—” He stopped, looking for the right language. “Yes?” the doctor said. “Alice is a lamp. A bright lamp, from the moment she was born. She kind of shines. Looking at her hurt my eyes, and I was afraid to touch her.” “You were afraid of her light?” “No. I was afraid I was going to put her light out. That my darkness would swamp her light.” “So you felt like you had to stay away from her, to keep her safe.” “I have to stay away from her, yes.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“I’d never seen that kind of love in person. My parents loved each other, but badly, and they were miserable. So were all the other couples in my neighborhood. Have you ever actually seen that kind of love?” William shook his head. He had married out of fear, because he didn’t think he was capable of steering himself into adulthood. He’d needed Julia to be his parent more than his”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Grief is love.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“It’s because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that’s the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The fact that he had failed meant he had to continue to walk forward with his life history—his mistakes—slung over his shoulders like a heavy backpack. This fact exhausted him, but he was too tired to reject it.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Opportunity did not knock until I built the door.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Kent’s affection for William was too clear and too uncomplicated. It shone on William like the sun. No one had ever loved him unconditionally like this, and that love, when he was the most undeserving he’d ever been in his life, made William feel like he was burning up.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“she felt tangled in a net of grief. Her father was dead, and her mother had turned her away. My soulmate would save me, she thought. He would see me, and I would feel more solid. But this brought a fresh sadness, because if she ever did meet this man, he would never have known her father. Sylvie studied the ceiling for most of the night. She felt tears deep inside her, but they couldn’t seem to find a way out. She still hadn’t cried.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“No one in his life, except perhaps Kent, had ever accepted him just as he was, and Sylvie had accepted him when he was so broken he was barely a person.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She’d carried a hesitation inside her ever since he’d met her at his basketball game when she was fourteen. Emeline had always seemed occupied with watching everyone else and trying to be helpful, but she’d stayed on the sidelines, as if it weren’t her turn to live.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“What do you want? Sylvie wouldn’t have asked this question before, because she would have been afraid of the answer, but she wanted to be deeply and truly herself and to experience the world in the deepest and truest way.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sylvie reached out for the notebook. Like him, she’d grown up going to confession in church. Entering the dark booth and lowering herself to the kneeler. Confessing her sins to the screen that separated her from the priest. William thought of that sacrament now and felt bad for all the children who were forced to divide their ordinary lives into sins and not-sins so they would have something to say to a cassocked stranger.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“She could feel her friends’ love pushing past her skin, into her body, and she cried too.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“When I read, I could pretend I was someone else. I was”
― Lara Love Hardin, The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

“stalked all these lives that weren’t mine. Even the sad people in books”
― Lara Love Hardin, The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

“Everyone’s parents loved me, except my own.”
― Lara Love Hardin, The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

“whoever she was becoming. She was grateful that her father had prepared her for this type of hard, lonely”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful