Abi > Abi's Quotes

“Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“There are certain people who are what I call sparkly humans. These are people who have things just happen for them or to them because other people see them and seemingly inexplicably want to help them. Because they sparkle. From the inside out. I was always a sparkly human (still am, for the most part, on most days). Adults just liked me and wanted to help me. Not kids at my school. Sometimes sparkliness isn’t recognized by peers until much later. Sometimes sparkly people are even bullied as kids. Because other kids want to put that light out. They don’t understand it and they want to kill it. The secret is, if you’re truly sparkly, you survive all that bullshit and you don’t let them put it out. And at some point, you start to get rewarded for it. Sparkly humans aren’t always entertainers, and they don’t always become famous. There are sparkly humans everywhere. And there are also plenty of people who are wonderful and amazing, but aren’t sparkly. It’s a very specific thing.”
― Busy Philipps, This Will Only Hurt a Little

“Say yes and you'll figure it out afterwards.”
― Tina Fey

“True sorrow is as rare as true love.”
― Stephen King, Carrie

“I saw the Cloud, though I did not foresee the Storm.”
― Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

“Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don’t even have a sound.”
― Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group

“We tend to die, women who’ve been through the fire. Sometimes we choose obvious ways, suicide and overdoses; sometimes we’re more subtle, marrying someone who likes to use his fists, or we drink too much and keep getting behind the wheel until we run out of luck.”
― Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group

“Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female”
― Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group

“Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“Banter can hide the worst sins. Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you. To uncover lies told by your husband. Jen would always have said Kelly was as straight as they come. But don’t all good liars seem that way?”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“Like the hindsight paradox,” he continues, when he’s bought the doughnuts. “Everyone thinks they knew what was going to happen. They said, I knew it all along! but, actually, they would say that no matter what the outcome. Because our brains are so good at considering every possibility. We’ve known whenever anything was going to happen.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“But isn’t humor a different kind of repression?”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“How segmented life is. It splits so easily into friendships and addresses and life phases that feel endless but never, never last. Wearing suits.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“The love, true love, it should have eclipsed the shame, but there is so much judgment involved in parenthood that it never did. The shame is so easy to access, at the school gates, at the doctor's, on fucking Mumsnet. She can't let it go.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“They, mother and son, are a zipper, slowly separating as the years rush by.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“Don’t worry. It’s – it’s nothing, probably,” she adds, wondering why she has always felt the need to do that. To be easygoing, not to worry people, to be good.”
― Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

“You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends