Danielle > Danielle's Quotes

“Depression is a serious illness. It’s physically painful, debilitating. And you can’t just decide to get over it in the same way you can’t just decide to get over cancer. Sadness is a normal human condition, no different from happiness. You wouldn’t think of happiness as an illness. Sadness and happiness need each other. To exist, each relies on the other, is what I mean.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“Grief plays tricks on you that way—a familiar whiff of cologne or a potential sighting of your person in a crowd, and all the knots you’ve tied inside yourself to manage the pain of losing them suddenly unravel.”
― Mikki Brammer, The Collected Regrets of Clover

“She was good at getting girls to fall in love with her. She couldn’t really love them back though. Like her dolls, they were all interchangeable. And loving everyone is the same thing as loving nobody at all.”
― Heather O'Neill, When We Lost Our Heads

“I’d say you just love the idea of her, then, she says. You’re pinning everything on something you’ve never even had. Something that’s not real.”
― Claire Daverley, Talking at Night

“Seasons of good, and bad, and totally fine. Sleepwalking. Routine-making. Life passing like cars. Smells of petrol and bleach and instant coffee. Chest pain, fresh tulips, calories burned and units consumed and late-night noodles out of a pot. Good sex; bad sex. Rude waiters, and crying women, and long phone calls with relatives that expect it but have nothing to say, talk only about the washing, the neighbors, the things outside the window. They do not think of each other. Often. They do not.”
― Claire Daverley, Talking at Night

“Please don’t shut me out. Or if you’re going to, just tell me, tell me so that I’m not dangling in this in-between place. You stood by me when my world was falling down around me.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“The idea of the half-eaten sandwich almost undoes me. That we could just step out of life one day, unfinished. Books half read. Wet washing still in the machine. Places unseen. Ambitions”
― Emma Grey, Pictures of You

“sunset, when the sun is low, the light has to travel farther through the atmosphere than it does at noon, when the sun shines straight at us. That means more of the blue and green light is scattered away, leaving predominantly yellows and oranges. That’s why”
― Malinda Lo, A Scatter of Light

“At sunset, when the sun is low, the light has to travel farther through the atmosphere than it does at noon, when the sun shines straight at us. That means more of the blue and green light is scattered away, leaving predominantly yellows and oranges. That’s why the sun appears redder at sunset. Remember, it’s not actually red. It’s the scattering of light that makes it seem that way to our eyes.”
― Malinda Lo, A Scatter of Light

“Flowers bloom and die. Stones rise up and are slowly weathered away. People change, too, obviously. We change continuously. We age. Our hair grows. We even shed our skin. This can seem frightening or overwhelming, and I think maybe that’s why we build structures like Stonehenge, or make art like the Sun Tunnels. The stones frame this constant change with the illusion of permanence, and for a moment—while we are watching the sun framed by the stones—for a fleeting second the world seems stable. Beautiful and miraculous. But you know what makes it a miracle? The fact that we are present in that moment, experiencing it fully, before it inevitably changes.”
― Malinda Lo, A Scatter of Light

“And he who said, “I feel like I don’t know you and can’t know you. You’re unknowable.” “Everybody in this world is unknowable. We cannot fully know others when we are sometimes strangers to ourselves,” I said, and he scoffed and said could I please not quote poems, even though it was not of course a quote.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count

“What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact. What did people who spoke of joy know of what it meant, to sleep and dream only of the whistle of planes and knocks at the door and on windows and to wake with a hand at one’s throat—one’s own hand, at one’s own throat. What did they know of not speaking for days, of not having known the touch of another, never having known, of want and of not having felt the press of skin to one’s own, and what did they know of a house that only ever emptied out. Of animals dying and fathers dying and mothers dying and finding bullet holes in the barks of trees right below hearts carved around names of people who weren’t there and the bloody lip of a sibling and what did—what did she know of—what could she possibly know of what it—”
― Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep

“She thought that might have been joy, or something like it. Something that feels sad as much as it feels like love.”
― Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep

“Sometimes, she thought, it’s easier to remain lonely than present the lonely person to the world, but she knew that this, too, was a trap, that unless she did something, the state might become permanent, like a stain soaking into wood. It was no good. She would have to go outside.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“For Cleo, the solution to a problem lay in the presence of other people, while Michael depended on their absence, and while the kindness of a friend was a precious and touching thing, it could also feel like an imposition.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“But something had happened to her confidence in those months, and even when restrictions eased, her own life barely altered. It was as if she’d returned from a foreign country and not let anyone know. The threshold of her flat seemed like a high diving board, too big a leap, too many people watching, and even when she made it out, what did she have to say? Conversation required a warm-up now, time set aside to workshop smiles and responses, and she no longer trusted her face to do the right thing, operating it manually, pulling levers, turning dials, for fear that she might laugh at someone’s tragedy or grimace at their joke. In Japan and California, they were developing robots with a more natural and spontaneous set of responses than she currently possessed.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“he still felt cracked and vulnerable, like a cup with a glued-on handle. Apparently, there was meant to be beauty in cracks, cracks were how the light gets in but, more importantly, they were how the liquid gets out. No one really wants a leaky cup.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“I suppose the main thing I feel now, and I want you to remember I’ve had a drink or two, is that I would have liked to have loved someone. You know, mutually, and for a period of time, and at that time of life, when you’ve got so much of it. Love, not salmon. I think I’d have been good at it. That’s what I wanted, and I did try, really. But he was the wrong . . . I don’t know . . . I was going to say object of affection, but he was just an object. It was a bad investment. I should have put it somewhere else.’ ‘Maybe you will.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Why would I? You don’t stop loving someone because you can’t have them. People have written books about it.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“mind was always changing about him, me, us, and I was liable to float into a new world of feeling before I even realized my feet were off the ground.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“If you’re not your mother’s only child, you know there’s not nobody in the world that can understand the dirt you fought to grow from like your brother.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Eyelashes. Get one stuck in the whites of your eye and you’ll feel the phantom of it long after it’s gone. Hope is like that too, I think. Once you feel the spark of it, suddenly it haunts every image and who you was before, what you thought you was okay with, all that breaks open to leave you hunched in a tub surrounded by remnants of who you could’ve been.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Unrequited love is like believing in fairies for a little too long, past the age it’s acceptable. Sure, there’s the eventual devastation that this thing you thought was real suddenly evaporated into nothing. But the worst part of it is the shame that you ever believed at all.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“I like to think of sand like love. The thing that’s true ’bout both of ’em is you only ever see them for what they look like when they’re right in front of you. And isn’t that sorta reckless? To only believe the thing in front of your face, not knowing nothing about where it came from. I loved reckless once. I took what was right in front of me ’cause it looked something like love and I didn’t know different and that’s what gets us sometimes. We think we’re loving when, really, we’re believing. We’re choosing to believe the sand was always white ’cause when we sink our toes into it and the heat surrounds our feet like warm hands, it feels like it can only be God’s hands. That there wasn’t no way it wasn’t created with the earth itself. But real love—love that you see every glimpse of like knocking on the door of a glass room—shows all of itself before it materializes solid. Look close enough and you see your own face, your own hands leathery and creased. Step back and you see the whole world. The quartz tumbling down the mountain to make sand as white and soft as crushed bone.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“When it comes to love, I’ve learned nothing. I’ve been reliving the same scenario ever since I was a teenager: I love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much so that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and saddened. When I love, I become harsh, serious, intolerant. A heavy shadow settles over my relationships. I love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.”
― Maud Ventura, My Husband

“And that moment, as I gazed with open-mouthed wonderment at the glorious sight before me, was when I fell in love with Parker. Ellery was magic and air and sweet confusion. Parker was the earth, solid and undeniable. It was easy to lean on him. Later, I would find out it was easier still to break against him. But I didn’t see that, not then. I didn’t see beyond the excitement of discovering every weekend what he’d planned for us. I failed to grasp the fact that he, and only he, had been in charge of things.”
― Jesse Q. Sutanto, Next Time Will Be Our Turn