Lily Frohlich > Lily's Quotes

“Everyone thinks like themselves, this is my point.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea

“Being seasick at sea is not the same as being homesick at home.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.”
― Aimee Bender, Willful Creatures

“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Because we all love imperfectly.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Who will let me be the real animal of myself?”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“There's a gift in your lap and it's beautifully wrapped and it's not your birthday. You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you're alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you're that important.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)”
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

“Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”
― Mary Oliver

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”
― Mary Oliver White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

“Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“Can’t you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“…just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“The truth is, I don't have a catchy method of conversing and yet unfortunately suffer of a minute to minute basis the agony of the unexpressed thought.”
― Miriam Toews, Women Talking

“A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad's socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hangs. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“I want to be violated by insight.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“I've noticed this: when it's the first date, and you fuck, the guy hold you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you're sort of the stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes that you're not her, and so you get all this nice residue emotion. I felt cherished, tucked into his belly, like we'd known each other for years and I was his wonderful girl and we both slept great.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think.
I think, maybe he hasn't even noticed that I'm gone.

But. I have.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt