Lena > Lena's Quotes

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“When I listened to her, I understood: You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do. I had to believe her, because she was living proof. Then she said, Good and bad things come from the universe holding hands. Wait for the good to come.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“I did not come into existence when he harmed me. She found her voice! I had a voice, he stripped it, left me groping around blind for a bit, but I always had it. I just used it like I never had to use it before. I do not owe him my success, becoming, he did not create me. The only credit Brock can take is for assaulting me, and he could never even admit to that.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“Hardships make or break people.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless : Tales of Transgression

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that's not what boats were built for.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. ”
― Carrie Fisher

“The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity; it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”
― Toni Morrison

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory. We're celebrated for marrying, but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“We are confined to the present, but this moment we're living now has, for all of history, been the future. And now, forever more, it will be past. Everything we do sets off unforeseeable, irreversible chain reactions.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“One thing I've learned is that you don't just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both.

[Jamie Graves]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Numbness is not an absence of feeling but a felt absence.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too.

[Marian Graves]”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“He reminds her of a statue that has been broken and glued back together, its shape the same but its surface spiderwebbed with cracks.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“The point was to be someone who didn’t treat fear like a god to be appeased.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Nothing weighs more than someone else’s belief in you.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends