Elle > Elle's Quotes

“nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“It’s so weird when people don’t go outside to enjoy the rain, or to see a rainbow when it appears, because they’re ‘in the middle of something’. It’s like, I’m sorry? Do you have better things to do? Like, what better things are there to do? What pressing or urgent matters could they possibly be to attend to? It’s fucking raining! There might be a fucking rainbow! Beings from other planets and dimensions would do anything to be a part of this into witness this shit! Get outside, dammit!”
― Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth

“Remember that life is short and full of surprises. If you wait too long, opportunities fade like setting sun.”
― Deborah Rodriguez, The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul

“Sometimes it really is as simple as saying a thing out loud, turning it into your newest truth.”
― Jacqueline Bublitz

“That in pain, there’s also joy. You can’t be in the presence of just one thought, that life is good, or life is bad, or life is sad. There’s all these things. And there are so many good people in the world, actually, so much kindness. It’s everywhere.”
― Leigh Sales, Any Ordinary Day

“I preferred to read than talk with the others.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.”
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

“Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“That was one lesson he should've learned the first time. We don't, of course. It's okay, Karla once said, because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn't need love at all.”
― Gregory David Roberts

“Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting”
― Gregory David Roberts

“It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative...we were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crispier, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I believe that if you don not listen to your heart on this matter, you will regret it forever.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“I have learned that if I want to rise, I have to sink first. I have to search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“Personal growth must sometimes be measured by distance travelled rather than by current position”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“No one could be expected to give up wine and books at the same time.”
― Liane Moriarty, Nine Perfect Strangers

“The mountains were just about the best therapy a person could experience.”
― Nimsdai Purja, Beyond Possible: One Soldier, Fourteen Peaks — My Life In The Death Zone

“I knew more than anyone that nature didn’t care for reputation, age, gender, or background. It was equally indifferent to personality: the mountain couldn’t give a shit if the people exploring it were morally nasty or nice.”
― Nimsdai Purja, Beyond Possible: One Soldier, Fourteen Peaks — My Life In The Death Zone

“Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“I just like having something edible to look forward to.”
― Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth

“I tried putting chopsticks from the kitchen drawer into my hair and it felt like it was over doing things a bit, so I put them back. I even considered painting the chopsticks black because they were brown, and black would’ve suited my outfit better. Yet the fact that I considered painting them at all caused me to be embarrassed at myself, so I decided to ditch the accessories that were at one time used to stuff pad Thai into someone’s face. Painted or not, you can’t change the reality of what chopsticks are or the main way that they’ve been used for, like, centuries. Eons, even. So let a chopstick be a chopstick, and my hair can be what it is, too.”
― Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth

“making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Because it engages the mind, Pilates generates an electrical impulse or a chemical in the nervous system that we register as enjoyment. These impulses and chemicals cause the brain to crave a repeat performance, and that is the stuff that creates addiction. You think you are addicted to an activity, but in fact you are addicted to the chemical by-product of that activity. You become your own drug dealer.”
― John Howard Steel, Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy

“At the beginning of the decade, the people I was close to seemed like friends for life, people I could never imagine not seeing every day. But life happens. Love happens. Loss happens. Change and growth happen at different paces for different people, and sometimes the paces just don’t line up. It’s devastating if I think too much about it, so I usually don’t.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“He has read enough to know there are no collections where each story is perfect. Some hits. Some misses. If you’re lucky, a standout. And in the end, people only really remember the standouts anyway, and they don't remember those for very long.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“And I thought to myself in that moment that this remarkable interaction had only come about because I’d decided to cartwheel to H&M, because I’d decided to choose wonder. And that’s just about as close to the point of it as I can get. Do I want to walk through this life of mine? Or do I want to cartwheel through it?”
― Trent Dalton, Lola in the Mirror