Bethany > Bethany's Quotes

“Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. That must be difficult.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. That must be difficult. Always having to prove that there’s more to you, wanting people to see beneath the surface, to be loved for yourself, and not your stunning body, sparkling eyes or thick, lustrous hair.
In most professions, getting older means getting better at your job, earning respect because of your seniority and experience. If your job depends on your looks, the opposite is true—how depressing. Suffering other people’s unkindness must be difficult too; all those bitter, less attractive people, jealous and resentful of your beauty. That’s incredibly unfair of them. After all, beautiful people didn’t ask to be born that way. It’s as unfair to dislike someone because they’re attractive as it is to dislike someone because of a deformity.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I wasn't good at pretending, that was the thing. After what had happened in that burning house, given what went on there, I could see no point in being anything other than truthful with the world. I had, literally, nothing left to lose. But, by careful observation from the sidelines, I'd worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little. Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don't find very funny, or do things they don't particularly want to, with people whose company they don't particularly enjoy. Not me. I had decided, years ago, that if the choice was between that or flying solo, then I'd fly solo. It was safer that way. Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“We can’t know why we are dying in the same way we can’t know why we are living. Living and dying are both complete mysteries, and toy can’t know either until you have done both.”
“That’s poetic. And ironic.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

“I think the same is true of dying. We can’t know why you are dying in the same way that we can’t know why you are living. Living and dying are both complete mysteries, and you can’t know either until you have done both.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

“Lenni," she said softly, "you're the bravest person I know."
"Why?"
"You just are," she said, and the moment fell between us."
"Dying isn't brave," I said, "it's accidental. I'm not brave, I'm just not dead yet.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn't care and went on anyway.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“She understands. There is nowhere to go but on. Still, part of her longs to go back”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, "Show me again, show me another." Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“And Lydia herself—the reluctant center of their universe—every day, she held the world together. She absorbed her parents’ dreams, quieting the reluctance that bubbled up within.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“She just wasn’t sure she had yet been to the place she was homesick for.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“That some things are a gift, even if you don't get to keep them.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“I worked it out sitting here. Maybe that’s the thing we need to understand, Alice. That some things are a gift, even if you don’t get to keep them.”
There was a silence before he spoke again.
“Maybe just to know that something this beautiful exists is all we can really ask for.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“be wary of preaching that is so rigid and unforgiving of human nature.”
― Devin Murphy, The Boat Runner

“I wished I had been there when the bombs fell, to have opened my mouth and swallowed their ordinance. Then spit it all back at them.”
― Devin Murphy, The Boat Runner

“Maybe that was the secret to dying—to live a life with so much heart that, when you go, you are never really gone.”
― Sara Ackerman, The Codebreaker's Secret

“The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning and be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.”
― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace