Ashley > Ashley's Quotes

“the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of “pervasive unsatisfactoriness,” I was even more impressed. “Suffering” always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. “Pervasive unsatisfactoriness”
― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even loved in spite of ourselves.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Funny how things can stay the same forever and then change so quickly.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“I wish that photographs were physical spaces, like tunnels; that you could crawl inside them and go back.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“The funny thing about almost-dying is that afterward everyone expects you to jump on the happy train and take time to chase butterflies through grassy fields or see rainbows in puddles of oil on the highway. It’s a miracle, they’ll say with an expectant look, as if you’ve been given a big old gift and you better not disappoint Grandma by pulling a face when you unwrap the box and find a lumpy, misshapen sweater.

That’s what life is, pretty much: full of holes and tangles and ways to get stuck. Uncomfortable and itchy. A present you never asked for, never wanted, never chose. A present you’re supposed to be excited to wear, day after day, even when you’d rather stay in bed and do nothing.

The truth is this: it doesn’t take any skill to almost-die, or to almost-live, either.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“There's a metaphor in that somewhere—like all of life is about ending up somewhere you didn't expect, and learning to just be happy with it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air. Sometimes people stop loving you. And that's the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Memory is like that, too. We build careful bridges. But they're weaker than we think.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“But sometimes the monster in the closet was really just a worthless clown in a coma.”
― Anne Frasier, Stay Dead

“Because the passage of time becomes molasses when dealing with the death of a loved one. A month. A year. Two years. All the same.”
― Anne Frasier, Stay Dead

“People were always trying to fix the past. They deliberately, often unconsciously, relived events similar to something that had gone wrong.”
― Anne Frasier, Stay Dead

“Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“When I look in the mirror, I know I’m looking at someone who isn’t sure she deserves to be loved at all.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“When you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“I make lots of mistakes. I try hard not to make the same mistake more than three or four times.”
― Janet Evanovich, Three to Get Deadly

“A woman's never too old to make an idiot of herself. It goes along with equality of the sexes and potty parity.”
― Janet Evanovich, Three to Get Deadly

“All my adult life I've hidden behind mascara. And if I'm really insecure, I add eyeliner. (Stephanie, Chapter 10)”
― Janet Evanovich, Hard Eight

“Look after my heart - I've left it with you.”
― Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse

“He sighed. "The clouds I can handle. But I can't fight with an eclipse.”
― Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse

“You are safe inside your mind. No one can reach you there.”
― Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse

“Since we place so much value on human life, why do we glorify, in a perverse sort of way, the extinguishment of life? The answer to that question, whatever it is, is at least a partial answer to why people continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Jack the Ripper—Manson.”
― Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

“No sense makes sense.” Charles Manson”
― Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Crime Classic and Definitive Account of the Manson Murders

“Charlie said that death was beautiful, because people feared death.”
― Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter

“Rumors multiplied like bacteria. One”
― Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter

“I wasn’t sure anymore what made a good marriage. There had to be love, of course, but there were so many different kinds of love. And clearly, some love was more enduring than others.”
― Janet Evanovich, Visions of Sugar Plums

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven