Reader > Reader's Quotes

“Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?”
― James Patterson, The Angel Experiment

“Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“...unrequited love does not die; it's only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.”
― Elle Newmark, The Book of Unholy Mischief

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”
― carson mccullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I have to admit, an unrequited love is so much better than a real one. I mean, it's perfect... As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“But you can be talky and paint your fingernails and still be very sad. In fact, you can be talky and paint your fingernails to protect other people from how sad you are.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“Adelaide wished to love someone and be loved back.

And to love someone and know that it was him she loved, not some idea of him.

Maybe that was two wishes. Maybe it was only one.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“And with that recitation, Adelaide Buchwald gave Jack Cavallero her
heart.
Impulsively,
gloriously,
openly,
she gave it to him, falling in love with someone she did not know,
wondering at the curve of his cheek, and the wave of his hair, and the way his
shirt draped over his shoulders.
He made her laugh. He dared to write poems. He risked looking foolish
in order to create something beautiful or strange.
She wanted to know the story of the scar on his abdomen. How had he
gotten that wound? How well had it healed?
She could see by looking at him that he had been
vulnerable.
That he had
lived.
Survived.
She wanted to see all his scars, see all of him, and she felt
suddenly,
intensely
certain
that he was a safe person to show her own scars to.
She thought, Maybe we have known each other always. Maybe our hearts
encountered each other somehow,
like two hundred years ago at a cotillion, with him in a frock coat and me
in whatever, some kind of elegant and complicated dress.
Or maybe our encounter was in another
possible world. That is,
in one of the countless other versions of this universe, the
worlds running parallel to this one,
we are already
in love.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“She would love herself, even with her
sadness and her
distractibility, her
defenses and her
failures.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“Think of your happy memories. Know they are still in you. They are part of you. And maybe even they ARE you.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“People befriend me because they think I’m happy. I’m not even sure why they think I’m happy, but they do. I get distracted, and I laugh, and I turn something on in myself that makes me, maybe, fun to be with. And I’m just— I want you to know up front that I’m false advertising.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“He’s the guy who says he’ll do a project and doesn’t do it,” said Stacey S. “And he’s the guy who says he’ll be somewhere when he can’t actually be there, because he doesn’t want to disappoint someone. He always says yes, but he doesn’t mean it, and people get jerked around.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“Maybe I even have, like, an addiction to love, or to relationships or something. It’s like being in love makes me feel better, much better, than I do the rest of the time. Except when it makes me miserable. Maybe it’s an endorphin rush? Or a validation? Romantic obsessional tendency—that is not a good quality in a person.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“All four of them took a moment to wish. Adelaide wished to love someone and be loved back. And to love someone and know that it was him she loved, not some idea of him. Maybe that was two wishes. Maybe it was only one.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“Adelaide was suddenly gloriously happy. It was terrible to be gloriously happy that Mikey was sad, and terrible even to be gloriously happy that Mikey loved her, since Adelaide had been a complete failure at happiness when he didn’t love her. It was, after all, a bad idea to hinge your happiness on someone else’s feelings. But that was just how it was. She did hinge them.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“Jack was never going to tell Adelaide his secret pain. He wasn’t going to take her to the philosophy film series. He might like her, might like her a lot, but he wasn’t going to be hers. He wouldn’t be utterly infatuated with her and only her, physically and mentally, the way Adelaide had been with Mikey once, the way Adelaide was now, with Jack. What Adelaide wanted was to be enmeshed with someone else. She wanted to be unconditionally and exclusively adored.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“The music was turbulent. It made her feel as if the sky was about to break open, and as if Mikey not loving her and Toby being an addict were being pushed through the music into the sky.”
― E. Lockhart, Again Again

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn't talk to myself in my head. There wasn't much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident? It seemed implausible.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

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

“I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.”
― Sarah Dessen, Dreamland

“If you didn't love him, this never would have happened. But you did. And accepting that love and everything that followed it is part of letting it go.”
― Sarah Dessen, Dreamland