Vanessa > Vanessa's Quotes

“Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Once you know you are worthy and your story is worthy, you fight for other stories.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins

“And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,
I whose choices made her what she will be?”
― Jane Hirshfield, After

“The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets after summer rain on maples and sycamore.”
― Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems

“The ones we pretend to ignore are the ones we're most aware of.”
― Janice Pariat, The Nine-Chambered Heart

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What a job, to raise someone from birth to adulthood, bestowing upon them your knowledge and your values and, despite your best intentions, any number of traits you've inherited yourself. What a loaded task, to make every move, every day, in such a way that the impressionable larva-person in your home will see your example, process it into something with herself, and grow layers of muscle and soul over it until she is a fully developed human being. And all the while, the little person you're nurturing is fighting you - spitting out the broccoli, not wearing the helmet, rolling her eyes at your carefully chosen words of advice - and you become constantly worn down even as you pour your energies into loving her.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“Make sure your identity isn’t based on something you might lose. You are not the size of your waist or your health or your job or someone else’s opinion of you.”
― Meg Fee, Places I Stopped on the Way Home: A Memoir of Chaos and Grace

“What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“And who among us is not neurotic, and has never complained that they are not understood? Why did you come here, to this place, if not in the hope of being understood, of being in some small way comprehended by your peers, and embraced by them in a fellowship of shared secrets? I don't know about you, but I just want to be held.”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Maybe another person couldn’t irrevocably save you, but they could sometimes calm you down, and that felt like an exquisitely magical thing.”
― Claire Lombardo, The Most Fun We Ever Had

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing.

I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them. To know what it was like to have one place where we belonged. Where we fit.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with “mother” as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.”
― Michele Filgate, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

“All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never - could never - set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn't, you might burn the world to the ground.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“They'd both learned that a memory is a fact that has been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room or anyone who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
― Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

“What is your current work doing to you as a person – to your mind, character and relationships?”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“Mediocrity isn’t a part of the successful women’s handbook, but I’m sorry, boys, for you it is. Women have to push harder, jump farther, stay later, think better, shit faster, all while trying their best to maintain whatever society says today their body should look like, how they should parent, what they should wear, when they should find love, what’s inappropriate for them to do, say, be, feel, or fuck. The outward pressures are constant, but the inward congestion of doubts and insecurities are sometimes louder—women really can have it all!”
― Abbi Jacobson, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

“It seems that a lot of men are confusing being asked not to violate other people's sexual boundaries with being forbidden to participate in basic human activities such as dancing, dating, chatting, walking around, going to work. and telling jokes.”
― Lindy West, The Witches Are Coming