Laura Panopoulos > Laura's Quotes

“And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”
― Margaret Atwood

“But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”
― Margaret Atwood

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”
― Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

“livid, adj.

Fuck You for cheating on me. Fuck you for reducing it to the word cheating. As if this were a card game, and you sneaked a look at my hand. Who came up with the term cheating, anyway? A cheater, I imagine. Someone who thought liar was too harsh. Someone who thought devastator was too emotional. The same person who thought, oops, he’d gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Fuck you. This isn’t about slipping yourself an extra twenty dollars of Monopoly money. These are our lives. You went and broke our lives. You are so much worse than a cheater. You killed something. And you killed it when its back was turned.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?...'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That's what everyone wants. Not 24/7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche...or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can't hide. Every single successful song of the past fifty years can be traced back to 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.”
― David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

“recant, v.

I want to take back at least half of the “I love you”s, because I didn’t mean them as much as the other ones. I want to take back the book of artsy photos I gave you, because you didn’t get it and said it was hipster trash. I want to take back what I said about you being an emotional zombie. I want to take back the time I called you “honey” in front of your sister and you looked like I had just shown her pictures of us having sex. I want to take back the wineglass I broke when I was mad, because it was a nice wineglass and the argument would have ended anyway. I want to take back the time we had sex in a rent-a-car, not because I feel bad about the people who got in the car after us, but because it was massively uncomfortable. I want to take back the trust I had while you were away in Austin. I want to take back the time I said you were a genius, because I was being sarcastic and I should have just said you’d hurt my feelings. I want to take back the secrets I told you so I can decide now whether to tell them to you again. I want to take back the piece of me that lies in you, to see if I truly miss it. I want to take back at least half the “I love you”s, because it feels safer that way.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy," Mom told me. "You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.”
― Margaret Atwood

“But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer

“Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“When do I stop? When I'm tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tell s you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Oh tragedy, oh tragedy, the boy said to himself, but he was smiling a little. Oh joy, oh joy. Hearts and stars exploded in the darkness above their heads.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Don't hide behind the Constitution or the Bible. If you're against gay marriage, just be honest, put a scarlet 'H' on your shirt, and say, 'I am a homophobe!”
― Henry Rollins, Talk is Cheap: Volume 1

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and they rocks took flight, the earth exploding... and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere