Utkarsh > Utkarsh 's Quotes

“The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“That is the thing about the water, it is not yours to control. You are at the mercy of nature. That’s what makes surfing feel like more than sport: It requires destiny to be on your side, the ocean must favor you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“It was as if June had given her a box—as if every parent gives their children a box—full of the things they carried. June had given her children this box packed to the brim with her own experiences, her own treasures and heartbreaks. Her own guilts and pleasures, triumphs and losses, values and biases, duties and sorrows. And Nina had been carrying around this box her whole life, feeling the full weight of it. But it was not, Nina saw just then, her job to carry the full box. Her job was to sort through the box. To decide what to keep, and to put the rest down. She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Too much self-sufficiency was sort of mean to the people who loved you, Kit thought. You robbed them of how good it feels to give, of their sense of value.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Alcoholism is a disease with many faces, and some of them look beautiful.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“She knew it was up to her to say what had to be said. To do what had to be done. When there is only you, you do not get to choose which jobs you want, you do not get to decide you are incapable of anything. There is no room for distaste or weakness. You must do it all. All of the ugliness, the sadness, the things most people can't stand to even think about, all must live inside of you. You must be capable of everything.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“She was a woman, after all. Living in a world created by men. And she had long known that assholes protect their own. They are faithful to no one but surprisingly protective of each other.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Just because it is in Malibu's nature to burn, so was it in one particular person's nature to set fire and walk away.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Our family histories are simply stories. They are myths we create about the people who came before us, in order to make sense of ourselves.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“How were you supposed to change- in ways both big and small- when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“There’s no room for you in my life anymore. And I don’t owe it to you to make any space.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“She missed the parents who had never truly understood her, missed the man who had never truly loved her, missed the future she thought she had been building for herself, missed the young girl she used to be.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “. . . you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but . . . I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you'd get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I've eliminated half the Earth's population from my potential readers, and you know what? I don't feel ashamed of that. I feel pissed.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Falling's the part that takes your breath away. It's the part when you can't believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It's supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“He fit so perfectly in the love story I'd imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“When I watch you sleep," he said shakily, "I feel overwhelmed that you exist.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“I'd subliminally determined at this point that the only way to really know what was going on in the world was to listen to women talk. Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs

“All men are weak,' said Phin.
'That's the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.'
My breath caught at the power of this statement. I immediately knew it to be the truest thing I'd ever heard. The weakness of men lay at the root of every bad thing that had ever happened.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs

“They weren’t bad books,” Phin countered patiently. “They were books that you didn’t enjoy. It’s not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a ‘good book’ for someone.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs

“Nora.” He just barely smiles. “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like … like everything will be okay.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“That’s life. You’re always making decisions, taking paths that lead you away from the rest before you can see where they end. Maybe that’s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we’ll never have.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”

I can see all of the shades of him at once. Quiet, unfocused boy. Precocious, resentful preteen. Broody high schooler desperate to get out. Sharp-edged man trying to fit himself back into a place he never belonged to begin with.

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“A good bookstore,” Charlie says, “is like an airport where you don’t have to take your shoes off.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers