Candis Brehm > Candis's Quotes

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“No matter who is in our bed each night we sleep with ourselves.”
― Matthew McConaughey

“Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“...We are only as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“But loving somebody isn't perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it's a gut punch. That's why it's a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn't deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else's. It's sacred.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“No matter who you choose to go down the road with, you're gonna get hurt. That's just the nature of caring about someone. No matter who you love, they will break your heart along the way.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“A great deal is expected of anyone who's been given a lot.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.”
― Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

“There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The question we need to ask ourselves is: what is success to us? More money? That's fine. A healthy family? A happy marriage? Helping others? To be famous? Spiritually sound? To express ourselves? To create art? To leave the world a better place than we found it?

What is success to me? Continue to ask yourself that question. How are you prosperous? What is your relevance?

Your answer may change over time and that's fine but do yourself this favor – whatever your answer is, don't choose anything that would jeopardize your soul. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don't spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don't depend on drinking the Kool-Aid – it's popular, tastes sweet today, but it will give you cavities tomorrow.

Life is not a popularity contest. Be brave, take the hill. But first answer the question.”
― Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

“The happiness of one man and woman is the greatest thing in all the world.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it's not faith, right?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“You have to have one person in your life that you know would never do anything to steer you wrong. They may disagree with you. They could even break your heart, from time to time. But you have to have one person, at least, who you know will always tell you the truth.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“We need to think about the fact that we are all more than the worst thing we have done.”
― Anthony Ray Hinton, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

“a story will tell itself, when it’s ready”
― Jodi Picoult

“History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Power isn't about doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present a s a pulse.”
― Lisa Wingate, Before We Were Yours

“She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I happen to believe every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment, slantwise in the light of dusk[.]”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January