Anna > Anna's Quotes

“Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person's hope. Leave it with me and I'll look after it for a while , if it feels too heavy for now.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“None of us would ever fully grasp the extent of our magnificent unoriginality -- it would be too painful to process...There was the evidence, in all these profiles, where who we really are and who we'd like everyone to think we are were in such unsubtle tension. How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million cliches, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nutured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. Non of us are special. I don't know why we fight it so much.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Jethro's flat was in a warehouse that, even from the outside, looked very pleased with its own conversion.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“You know, every time you ‘change your mind’ in such an extreme way, it takes something from a woman. It’s an act of theft. It’s not just a theft of her trust, it’s a theft of her time. You’ve taken things from her, so you could have a fun few months. Can you not see how selfish that is?”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Then I realized—he would be able to decide when he wanted to fall in love and have a family and it would happen. There would always be a woman who wanted to love him. He didn’t have to take this chance at all—he could wait for another chance. Then another one. The female population was just an endless source of chances and he could wait as long as he wanted. There was so little risk involved when it came to who and how he loved. Nothing meant anything to him.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?", my mother always asked me. "I don’t know", I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“But I doubt you did any of those things unless you have a mullet or a deep sense of irony.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Because life is shorter than we are, she says, so why beat around the bush?”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“Until all my words had spilled to the floor. I was too drunk to pick them up. So leave them there.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I asked her if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“...nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“My pristine grief was intermittently marred by dread. I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“Once a cucumber turns into a pickle, you can't turn it back into a cucumber. And I've been pickled by the internet for a long time.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuations and love poems. Sometimes I wonder if the yearning I’ve felt for others was more of a yearning for yearning itself. I’ve pined insatiably and repeatedly: for strangers, new lovers, unrequited flames. While the subjects changed, that feeling always remained. Perhaps, then, I have not been so infatuated with the people themselves, but with the act of longing.

from “Life without Longing,” The New York Times (9 February 2019)”
― Melissa Broder

“Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

“In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely, that's how every ideology functions.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“That's the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there's something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn