Penny Doucette > Penny's Quotes

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.”
― Stephen King, Dolores Claiborne

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.”
― Stephen King

“The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows”
― Stephen King

“Maybe time didn't heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember with a smile instead of a sob.”
― Kristin Hannah, Night Road

“Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something”
― Harlan Coben, Six Years

“Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once”
― Harlan Coben, Six Years

“There's always a price you pay when you lie. Once you introduce a lie into a relationship, even for the best of intentions, it is always there. Whenever you’re with that person again, that lie is in the room too. It sits on your shoulder. Good lie or bad lie, it's in the room with you forever now. It's your constant companion.”
― Harlan Coben, Seconds Away

“We are often told during times of bereavement that time heals all wounds. That's crap. In truth, you are devastated, you mourn, you cry to the point where you think you'll never stop - and then you reach a stage where the survival instinct takes over. You stop. You simply won't or can't let yourself "go there" anymore because the pain was too great. You block. You deny. But you don't really heal.”
― Harlan Coben, Live Wire

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
― Stephen King

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.”
― JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

“Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
― John Lennon

“One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside.”
― John Lennon