Lauren Buell > Lauren's Quotes

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The secret to a good life, he once told me, 'is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you're doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.'
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”
― Karen Joy Fowler

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last for only as long as you can take out a book.'
-We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”
― Karen Joy Fowler

“Where you succeed will never so much matter as where you fail."
-We Are All Beside Ourselves”
― Karen Joy Fowler

“Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“You might think you could run away and change your name and I don't know what all. Start over. And then one mornin' you wake up and look at the ceilin' and guess who's layin' there?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you're the one.
It could have gone either way.
The coin didn't have no say. It was just you.
Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“My run up the avenue was complicated by the fact that everyone was staring at their damn phones and tablets, and not at the road ahead of them.”
― Drew Magary, The Postmortal

“Sometimes I think the fact that she died is the reason I'll never stop loving her. She wasn't around long enough for me to grow tired of her personality or her appearance. Every relationship seems to lead to that end. She said it herself. She left me just as my mind had perfected her. The prime condition of love...Sometimes I wonder if that's a good thing. I despise myself for thinking that.”
― Drew Magary, The Postmortal

“We now live in a world where I think many people walk around asking themselves , do other people matter? Does the rest of the world mean anything to me? Or is all that matters this very small world of friends and family and colleagues that I've constructed for myself?”
― Drew Magary, The Postmortal

“I saw her dying on the screen, and I had to fight the urge to turn it off, because it was just so easy to do that and not deal with it--to let her be some distant problem I didn't have to acknowledge.”
― Drew Magary, The Postmortal

“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one...Mariam wished she's been a better daughter to Nana. She wished she's understood then what she understood now about motherhood.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Marriage can wait. Education cannot...Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she would die this way. Now so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of legitimate beginnings.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“...Mariam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”
― Gillian Flynn

“There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“When a child knows that young that her mother doesn't care for her, bad things happen.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“First of all," he said, "if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, On Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

“A lady?' Jem raised his head. His face was scarlet. 'After all those things she said about you, a lady?'
'She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe... son, I told you that if you hadn't lost your head I'd have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her- I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller