Valerie Brett > Valerie's Quotes

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

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“You can have it all. Just not all at once.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“And I though about people all over the world, having panic attacks. We all must, right? Even those with the soundest of mind must come face to face, sometimes, with the fact that we will die one day. What varies is how we cope with it.”
― Gabrielle Bell, The Voyeurs

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“...nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book...”
― Nickolai Gogol

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”
― Tara Westover

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Then, people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple- When in actuality, women ARE complicated. Women are multifaceted. Not because women are crazy . But because people are crazy, and women happen to be people.”
― Tavi Gevinson

“I am happiest as a set of eyes, and my goal whenever I go into a movie or album or book is to lose myself in the story and find myself on the way out.”
― Tavi Gevinson

“The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
― Madonna

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.”
― George Carlin

“We’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying This is too much, and we call that conditioning “grit” or “hustle.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“Facebook spent more on lobbying than oil giant Chevron or ExxonMobil and more than drug giant Pfizer or Roche.”
― Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

“Halley was brilliant. Here’s just one example of his use of lateral thinking, as discussed in John and Mary Gribbin’s book Out of the Shadow of a Giant: When asked to work out the acreage of land in every English county, Halley “took a large map of England, and cut out the largest complete circle he could from the map.” That circle equated to 69.33 miles in diameter. He then weighed both the circle and the complete map, concluding that since the map weighed four times more than the circle, the area of England was four times the area of the circle. His result was only 1 percent off from contemporary calculations.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“became sick with meningitis just after returning to Indianapolis from a trip where I visited both Ethiopia and Orlando, Florida. My neurologist told me I probably caught the virus in Orlando, because, and I’m quoting him here, “You know, Florida.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“(Rebekah Neumann was largely focused on her acting career; she was known to tell friends as they toured the first office that she chose the coffee, and that it was the “secret” to the business’s success.)”
― Eliot Brown, The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion