Allison > Allison's Quotes

“Sometimes the right thing feels all wrong until it is over and done with.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“I can't believe anyone would voluntarily run 26 miles. Sometimes I sit on the couch cross-legged because I don't feel like walking to the bathroom.”
― jen lancaster

“You want to change? Lose the bitch. Be nicer to people. Stop telling them to "bite you" and threatening to kick them until they're dead.”
― Jen Lancaster

“A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.”
― Jodi Picoult

“When you love someone you let them take care of you.”
― Jodi Picoult

“In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn; color your hair; watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.
In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world; or you can just jump off it.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?”
― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

“I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you're not married or coupled up, whether you've been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.”
― Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed

“If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.”
― Lori Lansens, The Girls

“How could she tell him that we come to love those who save us?”
― Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

“There's no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
― Wally Lamb, Couldn't Keep it to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.”
― Christopher Buckley

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
― Anna Quindlen

“I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it...why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer.”
― Anna Quindlen, One True Thing

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”
― Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud

“When you really want to say no, say no. You can't do everything - or at least not well.”
― Anna Quindlen

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.”
― Jodi Picoult, Mercy

“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“All I'm saying is, kindness don't have no boundaries.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help