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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“I'm no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“What's everyone talking about?"
"The end of The Iliad."
"That's the best part," Marx said.
"Why is it the best part?" Sadie asked.
"Because it's perfect," Marx said. "'Tamer of horses' is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn't have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven