Florence > Florence's Quotes

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion - an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“It's a lot more than mind over matter. It takes relentless self discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Whenever I’m worried about anything,” said this guy Ben, “I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important.” I acknowledged that this was a great comfort. Svetlana”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“It’s so rare in the world to meet somebody you connect to. Most people are so awful. In the big picture, bad breath just seems relatively manageable.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special - which is fair, who doesn’t - but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“in any game, you gotta have a short-term memory. Someone tell you some shit you don’ like? Forget it the minute they mouth close. Someone tell you some shit you do like? Man,” he said, sucking his teeth so hard that I swore he was about to swallow them, “you betta forget that shit even quicker.”
― Mateo Askaripour, Black Buck

“Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?”
― Mary Oliver, Blue Iris: Poems and Essays

“But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The braver I am, the luckier I get.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed