Meredith > Meredith's Quotes

“The future is unclear. But it’s still mine.”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“The most ordinary things could be made extraordinary.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Lucky One

“Because I can count on my fingers the number of sunsets I have left, and I don't want to miss any of them.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“Aim higher in case you fall short.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend.”
― Sarah Dessen, Someone Like You

“Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Best of Me

“Don't think or judge, just listen.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

“It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

“No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater...The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that's the key. It's like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot.”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

“Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. It just doesn’t catch up, it overtakes … blotting out the future.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

“Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you.”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

“Family isn’t something that’s supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They’re born, they die. It’s always evolving, turning into something else.”
― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. We had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, and the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You can't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build your world from it.”
― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“On Elsewhere we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be. We never know what will happen...”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart / Inkspell / Inkdeath

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“...racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.”
― Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk

“Love, in the universal sense, is unconditional acceptance. In the individual sense, the one-on-one sense, try this: we can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it. The intensity of the love is weighted by how much better.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“So you didn’t tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because. . .”

“Because experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There’s only one thing that’s universal.”

“What’s that?”

“The truth.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it...Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you.”
― Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk

“Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“It's easy to look back and say if things had been perfect, I could have accommodated all of those things into my life. But as a therapist I do not allow that word to be uttered in my office after the first session, because I believe the only reason for the existence of that word is to make us feel bad. It's the only word in the language (that I know of) that is defined in common usage by what can't be. It sets a vague standard that can't be met because it is never truly characterized. I prefer to think that we're all out here doing our best under the circumstances, looking at our world through the only eyes through which we can look at it: our own.”
― Chris Crutcher, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography – The Riveting, Laugh-Out-Loud Funny Young Adult Coming-of-Age Memoir

“Like I said before, Rudy says, it's all about differences. Something about humans really doesn't like them, when they are the very thing we should embrace. If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares or angers you.”
― Chris Crutcher

“I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day. ”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You'll connect or you won't, but you did what you could. It's like playing ball in some way. There are guys on the team, like Cody, I'd give my life for. But you have to be willing to lay down your life for all of them if you want to put the best you on the field. Every guy on that field has to believe you'll bring nothing back off the field with you.”
― Chris Crutcher

“Experience is the only teacher,” Hey-Soos says. “Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them?”
― Chris Crutcher, Deadline

“From a distance,' he says, 'my car looks just like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has.'

Jesus. I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.

So,' Lemry says quietly, 'your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?'

Ellerby shakes his head. 'My subject will be shame.”
― Chris Crutcher, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

“Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.”
― James Patterson, Sundays at Tiffany's