Danielle > Danielle's Quotes

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”
― John Green

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold

“I will look at the past, but I will not stare at it.”
― M. Spio, A Song for Carmine

“It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.”
― Alice Sebold

“I'm not going to feel guilty for wanting the things that everyone wants.”
― Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel

“As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk

“It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.”
― Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel

“Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest..”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me.”
― Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The most difficult aspect of moving on is accepting that the other person already did.”
― Faraaz Kazi

“I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“She knew that this day, this feeling, couldn't last forever. Everything passed; that was partly why it was so beautiful. Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too.

The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.”
― Lauren Oliver, Panic

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.”
― Amy Hempel

“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold, Lucky

“Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.”
― Chuck Palahniuk , Invisible Monsters