Courtney > Courtney's Quotes

“There is no more powerful skill for success in any field than knowing how to ask the right questions.”
― Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

“Whenever he'd launch into talking, his turtle-green eyes would get a dark zoom when he rummaged for words, like a hand silently dipping into a Scrabble bag, feeling for the next vowel.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People's Clothes

“Her words squiggled onto the page like the laces of a girl running for her life with untied boots.”
― Heather O'Neill, When We Lost Our Heads

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It's funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we're at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he's trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse.
I am not a muse.
I am the somebody.
End of fucking story.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it's not faith, right?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“You have to have one person in your life that you know would never do anything to steer you wrong. They may disagree with you. They could even break your heart, from time to time. But you have to have one person, at least, who you know will always tell you the truth.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“You're all sorts of things you don't even know yet.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“She was happy, in a bubble, and the only reason to pop it was on the grounds that bubbles were not real life. But bubbles made life tolerable, and the trick was to blow as many as possible. There were new-baby bubbles, and honeymoon bubbles, and success-at-work bubbles, and new-friends bubbles, and great-holiday bubbles, and even tiny TV-series bubbles, dinner bubbles, party bubbles. They all burst without intervention, and then it was a matter of getting through to the next one. Life hadn’t been fizzy for a while. It had been hard.”
― Nick Hornby, Just Like You

“In Lucy’s experience, these were the two genders, boys and readers. She wished there was as much gender fluidity as people seemed to think.”
― Nick Hornby, Just Like You

“Lucy understood it now. The referendum was giving groups of people who didn’t like each other, or at least failed to comprehend each other, an opportunity to fight.”
― Nick Hornby, Just Like You

“The carpet is a thin veil meant to make the harsh metal look like something soft and welcoming, rather than the monstrosity it would be in its natural state. It takes so little to trick the eyes, but I am lying on the thin deception, and the cold, unmalleable frame is bleeding into me until I start to shiver.”
― Bethany C. Morrow, Cherish Farrah

“You don't need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Greif was a loneliness that felt like a planet.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside-some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“...and she thought how sad it was that a single bad thing could turn you into a story, a matter to be whispered about. Tragedy was undiscerning and totally unfair.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“But Saffy knew about catastrophe. It was arbitrary. A thing descended from nowhere, pointed a bony finger, and smirked. As if to say: I choose you.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“It seemed, then, that mothering did not have to be so rigid. There was no arc to it, no frame through which it ended or began. Mothering could be as simple as this: a woman and her very own blood, breathing in tandem through the darkest heart of night. *”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution