Elise > Elise's Quotes

“There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, “I was there,” and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I miss him in so many ways, but right now I miss him in the way you always miss someone when you're single among a room full of couples.”
― Emily Giffin, Baby Proof

“And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.”
― Emily Giffin, Love the One You're With

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“You can't quantify love, and if you try, you can end up focusing on misleading factors. Stuff that really has more to do with personality-the fact that some people are simply more expressive or emotional or needy in a relationship. But beyond such smokescreens, the answer is there. Love is seldom-almost never-an even proposition.”
― Emily Giffin, Baby Proof

“In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

“It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“She finally understood that, no matter how hard you try, you can't make someone love you. You can't stop them from making the wrong decision. There's no magic for that.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“I know what it does to you, I know. Maybe that's why we hold on as hard as we do. We just can't believe that such a miracle can happen to us twice. But it can, someday you'll find it again.”
― Laura Zigman, Animal Husbandry

“There are few things sadder in this life than watching someone walk away after they've left you. Watching the distance between your bodies expand until there's nothing but empty space and silence.”
― Laura Zigman, Animal Husbandry

“What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life—”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I have been called stupid many times in my life. I have been called dumb, obnoxious, trashy, raunchy, crass, a fake, and various other things throughout my career. I have been all of those things at certain moments, but not one of those words encapsulates who I am. None of the things other people have called me has ever really mattered. What other people say about you only matters if you believe what they are saying is true.”
― Chelsea Handler, I'll Have What She's Having

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The truth of the matter was: Who knows what drugs I was on? It could have been anything. It’s my state of mind that determines my behavior on drugs, and if I’m in a good place in my life, and I’m grounded, drugs are fun, and so am I; if I’m in a bad state of mind or in a bad time of my life, drugs will only make me defensive or angry, and that’s when I bite. What struck me in that moment was Jane’s brutal honesty.”
― Chelsea Handler, I'll Have What She's Having

“I survived, but it's not a happy ending.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Once safely inside the car, I texted the photo of the president and me to Andrew Cuomo. I wrote, “Good enough for a president, but not good enough for a governor.”
― Chelsea Handler, I'll Have What She's Having

“It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I didn’t want to date him, because dating a politician would definitely prohibit my own behavior, but I did want to have sex with him and tell all my friends about it.”
― Chelsea Handler, I'll Have What She's Having

“You used to be able to spot an ain't-shit man a lot easier. At pool halls and juke joints, speakeasies and rent parties and sometimes in church, snoring in the back pew. The type of man our brothers warned us about because he was going nowhere and he would treat us bad on the way to that nowhere. But nowadays? Most of these young men seem ain't-shit to us. Swaggering around downtown, drunk and swearing, fighting outside nightclubs, smoking reefer in their mamas' basements. When we were girls, a man who wanted to court us sipped coffee in the living room with our parents first. Nowadays, a young man fools around with any girl who's willing and if she gets in trouble - well, you just ask Luke Sheppard what these young men do next.

A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain't shit and by then, it might be too late. We were girls once. It's exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an ain't-shit man, long as you get it out of your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an ain't-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him.

Yes, those are the ones we worry about.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Bert and Bernice are both rather aloof, but even taking that into account, they weren’t acting like themselves. They were wandering around the property listlessly, not like dogs at all, but more like stray senile cats. Roy and I sat outside watching Bert smell a paddleboard for close to twenty minutes. “They seem a bit off, no?” I asked Roy. “Chelsea,” he said with a sigh, taking a sip of his beer. “You just sent your dogs on a methamphetamine high-speed car chase across the country because a governor wouldn’t fuck you during a global pandemic. Give it a minute. They’re detoxing.”
― Chelsea Handler, I'll Have What She's Having

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“The amount of time I have spent listening to women complain about losing complete autonomy over their lives due to having children would equal the amount of time it would take for me to complete a full-term pregnancy.”
― Chelsea Handler, I'll Have What She's Having