Shannon > Shannon's Quotes

“This feels like wealth, I think. This is the thing you save up for. You live your whole life so that you can be surrounded by too many people in too small of a room and tell the story of how it all happened.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“I’d like to be the person who could take all of your sad things and make them happy. Like I’d hunt down each one and turn it over.” “I don’t think anyone is that person for anyone,” I say. “I don’t think so either. But I’d like to be that person for you.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“When you smile at me, I feel like I want to capture it. But it’s not the regular way like when I see something beautiful and I want to photograph it. When you smile, it does something to me, I feel it in my chest, and I just want to figure out how to get you to do it again.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“I believe in love now; I’ve felt it and cannot unfeel it. It’s an imperfect thing, and it changes and breaks and heals the way people do.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“It’s like when you finally light a match on the beach and you have to cup it with your hands so it won’t blow out. I was getting a sense of myself and wanted to keep it.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“He gives me a sideways smile that says a million things, and I can feel in my body how much I like making Dan laugh. It’s incongruous, really. I like making him laugh while I also want to run my hands over his chest. And the science of male-female interaction dictates that the more I make him laugh, the less he’ll want to be touched by me. If I keep making him laugh, we’ll pal around and have a million inside jokes, and then I’ll be his wingman when he wants to go talk to Jennifer who’s sitting at the bar. Jennifer is soft and speaks with an upward lilt at the end of her sentences. Jennifer thinks Dan’s funny, and she’ll be the one who gets to touch his chest. This thought makes me inexplicably annoyed, like I want to punch Dan and maybe Jennifer too.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“If it were socially acceptable, I’d like him to present me with an affidavit stipulating that he wanted to kiss me as much as I wanted to kiss him, and that if I express an interest in another kiss, he will not rescind his interest. It would be nice if it were notarized.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“It feels good to want something for someone else, something that has nothing to do with you, just because you care about them. And I wonder if this is what love is. I rest my hand on my heart to feel if it’s changed. I think it has. I have.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“Love happens over breakfast.’ ” “It’s just something Cormack said when we were first married. Romance happens over dinner. The candlelight, the wine.” “Everyone looks a lot better than they usually do,” Cormack says and laughs. Reenie rolls her eyes. “Well, yes,” she says. “That’s the romance of it. But at breakfast everything’s just as it is, in the light of day. No one wears lipstick to breakfast. And this is where you talk about your day and the part of the roof that might leak this fall. You bring your real self to breakfast.”
― Annabel Monaghan, It's a Love Story

“It was this almost otherworldly feeling, where you’re so small, but not in a way that’s degrading or upsetting, but the fact that you’re on the planet at the same time as something so big and so significant, I don’t know—it was strangely life-affirming? Like you’re not alone in the world. And I get that same feeling when I’m near Sam Penny. Other feelings too, like this buzzy electricity. And it’s there, all thick in the air, us trying to learn about the other. It feels like we’re cramming for an exam, studying like maniacs the night before a test on a subject we’ve half-listened to all year. The content isn’t unfamiliar when you read it; it’s like you’ve read it before. Sam feels like I’ve read him before, but I haven’t. He feels like the kind of memories I wish I had but don’t. He’s like déjà vu. And you know how when that happens, your brain is like, “Wait, we’ve been here before,” and you’re watching everything unfold and you’re waiting for the next thing to happen and you’re like, “I knew that,” and then the next thing happens and you’re like, “I knew that too,” and every time something happens that you’ve been waiting to happen because you feel like it’s already happened even though it hasn’t, you feel this floaty sense of delighted satisfaction—that’s what it feels like to be near Sam Penny.”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“That God that my mom thinks she serves—he’s so much smaller than who I think the real one is. The real one—to me, he’s everywhere, in everything. And sure, maybe he speaks through the Bible. But also maybe he speaks through Narnia, and Harry Potter despite J. K. Rowling lately, and the trees, and science, and the stars, and black holes and the ocean and the way the sky looks sometimes, and you can feel it in your chest.”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“The concept of the gospel is counterintuitive and much easier to digest if you adhere to a strict regimen of shallow perfectionism, like Debbie does, or my mom. It’s in this hollow I think most of the church resides, but I think the place God would like us to be is in the gutters or the libraries asking questions about why a good God would make a world so fucked up.”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“You want to get over someone quickly?” I stare over at him. “Feel everything. Every shred of loss, everything you’re missing now that they’re gone. On lonely nights, be lonely. When you’re sad, look it in the eye. Every single memory I had of Storm, I ruminated on them for weeks on end and it felt like I fell into a fire, and then somehow, one day, after months of pain and months of forcing myself to feel all of it, I saw a picture of him and I didn’t feel like I was going to die anymore.”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“Sam doesn't do anything, doesn't say anything-it's not his fight, he doesn't need to-but the light casts his shadow on me and I know he’s there and I'm not by myself, which is a very powerful thing to feel when you've felt by yourself most of your life.”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“To death and for free.”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it’s stupid?”
― Abby Jimenez, Yours Truly

“There’s a special peace in sleeping next to someone you love. When you slip into the dark holding them and wake up and they’re still there and you know that everything that matters is just opening your eyes away.”
― Abby Jimenez, Yours Truly

“He shook his head. “I don’t care about Amy, Briana. I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever did. I’m glad she’s pregnant, I like being an uncle. And you know what? If you’re only with me for the kidney, I don’t care about that either. Because I am so fucking in love with you, I’ll settle for anything. Even that.” His voice broke on the last word.
I just stared at him. For the first time ever, I was totally mute.
“Use me,” he said, his eyes resigned. “Use me for whatever you want. Just stay.”
― Abby Jimenez, Yours Truly

“Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“I just mean, a story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends. But because of the way it’s written.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Life is strange. Always thinking that this one thing is going to make you happy. Because then you get it. And then you’re maybe not as happy as you imagined you would be. Because every day is just every day. Like the happiness becomes so big you have no choice but to live inside it. Until you can no longer see or feel it. And so you start to fixate on something else.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“There are some people in this world who remind you of exactly how you like to speak. She hasn’t met a person like this in a long time, not since she met her husband, which was why it was so painful when she started to forget how to speak to her husband. When she looked at him, she was too often reminded of what not to say, what never to mention, like ovulation, or depression, or anything that might carry a hint of sadness. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t tell him that Harry died. She didn’t want to give him any more proof of her unlovability, of her failure. Perhaps that’s why she just put a blanket over Harry and ran away, too.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Phoebe didn't think she'd end up being a woman like this. But if the last few years have taught her anything, it's that you really can't ever know who you are going to become.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“But what a shame. Because now I see that I was too young and beautiful then not to be naked all of the time.” When Patricia realized that’s exactly how she would feel when she was ninety—that she was too young and beautiful at sixty not to have been naked all of the time—she reached out to the artist. “It had been decades,” Patricia says.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Bridesmaids need the same kinds of stories soldiers do, stories that justify why they do what they do. Why they are willing to sacrifice who they are and a good night’s sleep for the noble cause of defending democracy and Lila and Gary’s love.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it’s this fixed state we’re going to reach. Like we’ll just be able to live there, forever. But that’s not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and goes. It shows up and then disappears like a bubble.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People