Emily > Emily's Quotes

“A happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.”
― Leah Stewart

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“So Sonia was not my only or even my first best friend. She was the last. It wasn t that I hadn t made friends since just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn t grant you an exclusive isn t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn t imagine ever living that moment again when you say with a shy and hopeful pride You re my best friend. The other person says it back and there you have chosen each other out of everyone else in the world. ”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.”
― Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone

“Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.”
― Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone

“But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”
― Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone

“Fuck you, I said."
Uh-oh. There's that angry word.”
― Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone

“Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

“Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“No art is possible without a dance with death.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.”
― Oscar Wilde

“One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“A happy ending isn't really the end. It's just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“Once you know the end of the story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.”
― Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone

“Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“Suddenly I blurted out. "I love you more than everything in the entire galaxy combined into one potent, delicious piece of gum!”
― Harvard Lampoon

“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.”
― Diane Setterfield

“Of course I loved books more than people.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale