Paisley > Paisley's Quotes

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I simply didn't know how to make things better. I could not solve the puzzle of me.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that you don't need anyone, you can take care of yourself.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person—what we felt about that person.”
― Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin

“You know what else I unfair, about Joel? That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him up.”
― Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin

“If I were you is something I’ve never really understood. Why say, “If I were you”? Why say, “If I were you,” when the problem is you’re not me? I wish people would say, “Since I am me,” followed by whatever advice it is they have.”
― Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin

“It was grotesque, the way I kept trying to save that relationship. Like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.”
― Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin

“Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Maybe we all walk around assuming everyone is interpreting the world the same way we are, and being surprised when they aren't, and that's the loneliness and confusion of the human experience in a nutshell.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“But maybe the trick isn't sticking everything out. The trick is quitting the right thing at the right time. The trick is understanding that saying "No, thank you" to something you're expected to accept isn't failure. It's a whole other level of success.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“Whether you think you know exactly who you'll become or have absolutely no idea, I tell them, one this is true for everyone, for better or for worse: Life will surprise you. You'll hit dead-ends and detours. There will be times when you can't fathom what comes next. When that happens, remember yourself as you are right now. Remember yourself as you were when you were even younger. Who were you when you weren't wondering who you were?”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion - an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“In therapy we aim for self-compassion (Am I human?) versus self-esteem (a judgment: Am I good or bad?).”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“peace. it does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. it means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn't need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn't need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“Most of us understand that your future is not promised to you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make. Your future is earned, little by little, through hard work and action. If you don’t act accordingly, that dream dissolves.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

“You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't. It's the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future.”
― Rebecca Serle, In Five Years

“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit.”
― Jenny Han, To All the Boys I've Loved Before

“He looked at me with a hundred stories lit behind his eyes.”
― Adrienne Young, Fable

“Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse - we can't remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn't changed very much since I was a child - a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that's all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You