Brit > Brit's Quotes

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
― T.S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot Reading: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others

“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
― T.S. Eliot

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
― T.S. Eliot

“The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

“When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch abroad his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”
― Adam Higginbotham, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“A story dies when no one tells it. Our stories have never been written down. Not like this. Part of me is scared. Have I told too much? Have I left too many tracks? What will you do with my story now that it has been written? I hope you will let it live.”
― Nemonte Nenquimo, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People

“Your feet know more about the forest than that government lawyer. Your toes know more about the forest than all of Civilization.” She nodded, unmoved by the thought, kept her eyes trained on the courtroom. She knew that already. When she was a young girl, on the trek with my father to the missionary village, she was bitten by a pit viper. The venom had coursed through her toes, up her ankles, her legs. Her feet had stepped on uncountable roots, seeds, leaves, mushrooms, thorns and been bitten by bullet ants and mosquitos, stung by wasps and scorpions and stingrays, dusted by tarantulas, burned by caterpillar hairs. Her feet could press into a garden’s soil and tell her when it was time to plant and when it was time to burn. Her toes could distinguish between the bark of cedar and mahogany, of peach palm and cinnamon, of kapok and guava.”
― Nemonte Nenquimo, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People

“The white people’s world seeks to destroy community.” She spoke in Spanish, using the word blanco-mestizo. “Once they destroy the community, then it is easy to destroy the individual.”
― Nemonte Nenquimo, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People