Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.”
― Bill Bryson

“Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Jealousy is like a hangover: When you are in the midst of it you want to die, you are poisoned, useless. Nothing stretches before you but an expanse of ashes and regret; yet despite the intensity of your suffering, no one feels sorry for you, no one cosigns your fury. No sympathy for you! Look how wantonly you indulged! Of course it hurts, but your suffering is nothing unique, everyone has suffered like that, so get ahold of yourself, show some backbone and discretion, for god’s sake. Don’t go making any major decisions. Jealousy and hangovers, as common wisdom goes, are temporary.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship, as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame:”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“I learned that people below the age of sixteen cannot deliver milk in the U.K., but I don't think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices, like summer.”
― David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.

“But home isn't where you land; home is where you launch. You can't pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Being seen is more about the ears than the eyes, it turns out.”
― Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish

“Wagamama. Text messaging aficionados might like to note that this is one of the most satisfying words you can possibly type.”
― Dave Gorman, Are You Dave Gorman?

“Some people, some events, make you lose your head. They’re like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and after.”
― Tomasz Jędrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“But I can’t manage to grow up and change shape. I’m still tiny, and staying that way, perhaps because I know the secret that everyone pretends to be unaware of, perhaps because I know that deep down we’re all tiny.”
― Delphine de Vigan, No and Me

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know if your happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh you'll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again?”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“There is something so wonderfully complex about labelling someone a ‘best friend’. It is leaps ahead of ‘friend’, who is just someone you like a bit without a special kind of bond tying you together like you are white-water rafting through life with each other. It’s a commitment, for starters, but one that you can’t ever imagine not being part of. You fall quite romantically for each other and think: ‘Yep, you. You will soon become an extension of my personality; I will finish your sentences and you will know all my most awful secrets, and therefore hold all the power over me for ever more. And, oh balls, I can never ever forget your birthday.”
― Emma Gannon, Ctrl, Alt; Delete: How I Grew Up and Stayed Sane Online

“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“I want to ask if she thinks that people are most interested in becoming parents after they become jaded. When our own hope buoys us to keep going, there is no need to go searching for it in another’s new and fresh world gaze.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I think the answers we seek - about ourselves and how we wish to live - are not preexisting. They don't lay dormant waiting to be found. They are little children who grow up and move away from the questions that brought them into the world, seeking out new questions to fall in love with.”
― Amy Stolls, The Ninth Wife

“Happiness is just a dog sunning itself on a rock. We're not put on this earth to be happy. We're here to experience great things.”
― Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

“A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: 'What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!”
― Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour

“She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“The worst moments in life are heralded by small observations.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there's little of us left to care.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“We see patterns in the world that don't exist, then attach serious significance to them on the off chance they may negatively affect us.”
― Dean Burnett, Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To

“I like choosing the right plate for the right food. A striped Cornishware plate for scones and clotted cream; a moss-green, rectangular platter for sushi; oysters from a round aluminium tray. There is no science behind this, it is purely a question of aesthetics, in the way that battered fish and chips ‘tastes better’ eaten out of paper or a Chinese takeaway does when eaten with chopsticks out of white waxed boxes than either does when tipped out onto a plate. It is why drinking a single espresso from a mug feels ‘just wrong’.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Throughout my long life, I have observed, again and again, this psychological pendulum that drives human nature. Every few decades they sway into a zone of unbridled optimism and insist on seeing everything through a rosy filter, only to be challenged and shaken by events and catapulted back into their habitual apathy and listless indifference.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“One year later, I grew out of my clothes because, it turns out, growing fourteen inches in a summer is easy. It's growing out of a label that's hard.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected.”
― David Nicholls, Us

“But life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women