idilreads > idilreads's Quotes

“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”
― 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

“Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You think everyone you like is special, she said. I'm just a normal person. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they're different from everyone else. You're doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You can love more than one person, she said. That's arguable. Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You're friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don't really value me? I don't have other friends, I said.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“At times I thought this was the worst misery I had experienced in my life, but it was also a very shallow misery, which at any time could have been relieved completely by a word from him and transformed into idiotic happiness.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until somewhat stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Make them pay you what they would pay a white man.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“When you're given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. The world doesn't give things, you take things.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Please never forget that the sun rises and sets with your smile. At least to me it does. You’re the only thing on this planet worth worshipping.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Heartbreak is a loss. Divorce is a piece of paper.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“You wonder what it must be like to be a man, to be so confident that the final say is yours.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“...do yourself a favor and learn to grab life by the balls, dear. Don’t be so tied up in trying to do the right thing when the smart thing is so painfully clear.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“You don't have to make yourself OK for a good mother; a good mother makes herself OK for you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organized in the exact right order, made you miss places you’ve never visited, and people you’ve never met.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“Nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“I never got to fall out of love. I just had to move on.”
― Christina Lauren, Love and Other Words