Sarah Smith > Sarah's Quotes

“She was not crying out of stress or frustration or fear, although she had so much of those still in her bones. She was crying because she missed her mother. She missed her perfume, her meatloaf, missed the way she made impossible things happen. Nina missed lying in her mother’s arms on the sofa, watching television late at night, missed the way her mother would always tell her everything would be OK, the way her mother could make everything OK.
She mourned the things that would never happen. The weddings her mother would never attend, the meals her mother would never make, the sunsets her mother would never see.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Alcoholism is a disease with many faces, and some of them look beautiful.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“She had already learned that the worst dreams were not the ones where the flaming walls were crashing down on you, or where armed men were chasing you, or where your beloved menfolk were dying before your eyes. They were the ones when your husband lived again, when your son still smiled, when your daughter looked forward to her wedding.”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until somewhat stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“It was as if June had given her a box—as if every parent gives their children a box—full of the things they carried. June had given her children this box packed to the brim with her own experiences, her own treasures and heartbreaks. Her own guilts and pleasures, triumphs and losses, values and biases, duties and sorrows. And Nina had been carrying around this box her whole life, feeling the full weight of it. But it was not, Nina saw just then, her job to carry the full box. Her job was to sort through the box. To decide what to keep, and to put the rest down. She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“A beautiful woman whom men find all the more alluring because she is essentially mute? I know, I always think the shock will kill me too.”
― Natalie Haynes, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

“Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I'm bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is- just me and the trees and the sky and the seas- I know now that that's enough.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“When there is only you, you do not get to choose which jobs you want, you do not get to decide you are incapable of anything. There is no room for distaste or weakness. You must do it all. All of the ugliness, the sadness, the things most people can’t stand to even think about, all must live inside of you. You must be capable of everything.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“She had lived thirty-four years keeping everything inside, and now she was letting everything go, like butterflies released from a box. They didn't burst forth, glad to be free, they simply flew away, softly, gradually, so she could watch them go. Good memories of her mother and grandmother were still there, butterflies that stayed, a little too old to go anywhere. That was okay. She would keep those.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Garden Spells

“I carried on because it was the only thing I could control. I carried on because I just wanted to be happy and everyone knows when you’re thinner, you’re happier. I carried on because, at every turn, society was rewarding me for my self-inflicted torture. I received compliments, I received propositions, I felt more accepted by people I didn’t know, nearly all clothes looked great on me. I felt like I had finally earnt the right to be taken seriously as a woman; that everything before that had been redundant. That I had been foolish to think I had ever been worthy of affection. I had equated love with thinness and, to my horror, reinforcement of this belief was everywhere. My health was plummeting, my stocks were up.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“But it would be a lie to say I think I will ever be entirely free of what happened in that time [...] You can restore your physical being to health; you can develop a ratinal, balanced, caring attitude [...] You can try as hard as you can to block it out, but sometimes, on very difficult days, it feels like you’ll never be as euphoric as that ten-year-old licking lurid jam off her fingertips, not ever again.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“For now just remember how you felt the day you were born: desperate for magic, ready to love.”
― Kate Baer, What Kind of Woman

“Don't you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?
Darling, he'd said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“There is a defiance in being a dreamer”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I am made of memories.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Timidity creates nothing.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Let him come back so that I can see his eyes as the light drains from them. Let him come back and die at the hands of his bitterest enemy. Let him come back so that I can watch him suffer. And let me make it slow.”
― Jennifer Saint, Elektra

“I would like to pause the story a moment to talk about ‘nothing will change’. I’ve heard it said to me repeatedly by women I love during my twenties when they move in with boyfriends, get engaged, move abroad, get married, get pregnant. ‘Nothing will change.’ It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity and the intimacy of our friendship will change for ever.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“Love was there in my empty bed. It was piled up in the records Lauren bought me when we were teenagers. It was in the smudged recipe cards from my mum in between the pages of cookbooks in my kitchen cabinet. Love was in the bottle of gin tied with a ribbon that India had packed me off with; in the smeary photo-strips with curled corners that would end up stuck to my fridge. It was in the note that lay on the pillow next to me, the one I would fold up and keep in the shoebox of all the other notes she had written before. I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love. There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty.”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe