Justine Laporte > Justine's Quotes

“I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess—a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.”
― William Landay, Defending Jacob

“These women have always worn motherhood big and loud on their chests, but Tova keeps hers inside, sunk deep in her guts like an old bullet. Private.”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“My neurons number half a billion, and they are distributed among my eight arms. On occasion, I have wondered whether I might have more intelligence in a single tentacle than a human does in its entire skull.”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Tova knew there was a bottom to those depths of despair. Once your soul was soaked through with grief, any more simply ran off, overflowed, the way maple syrup on Saturday morning pancakes always cascaded onto the table whenever Erik was allowed to pour it on himself.”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do and it's a messy one at that.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“They will call you hysterical no matter how much dignity you have. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Some men's childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can’t quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated, until you yourself die.
But that is the mirage.
That is grief’s dizzying spell.
The fall isn’t never-ending. It does have a ground floor.
Today, I cry for so long that I finally feel the floor under my feet. I find the bottom. And while I know the hole will be there forever, at least for now, I feel as if I can live inside it. I have learned its boundaries and its edges.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Why do I have to be nice when most of the men aren’t?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“I had extraordinary dreams, and an ordinary mind.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there's no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Higher intelligence doesn't make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn't necessarily make you a good person.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“Hunger, disease, war, warming- these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

“All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“You have to have one person in your life that you know would never do anything to steer you wrong. They may disagree with you. They could even break your heart, from time to time. But you have to have one person, at least, who you know will always tell you the truth.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six