Kim Ellis > Kim's Quotes

“were prepared to shake their heads when they looked at other, unacceptable, people. It was hard work, shaking your head like that, but it had to be done—there was no way round it.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, How to Raise an Elephant

“I’m saying that forgiveness is like the rain. That’s all I’m saying. It makes things better. Rain does that too.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, How to Raise an Elephant

“an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you’re an adult you realize that’s the worst part of it. That you have to have opinions all the time,”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“It’s important to remember how hard it is to ask for help,” she reminded me. “Never be impatient; all questions have value.”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“Books the fresh air breathed in to keep the heart beating, to keep the brain imagining, to keep hope alive.”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“thinks, as she lifts the plates, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until—what?”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“shine with pride. I knew how painful the death of that hope could be.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping.”
― Abi Daré, The Girl with the Louding Voice

“Hope,’ he said. ‘Damn thing never leaves you alone.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“There’s music everywhere, Mr. Baker. You just have to learn to listen for it.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“But that was the funny thing about wishes. Sometimes all it took to make them come true was a first step.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“Life, Linus Baker knew, came down to what we made from it. It was about the choices, both big and small.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“Funny how that works out, isn’t it? That we can find the most unexpected things when we aren’t even looking for them.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or, hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“No one has the life they want. People make choices.”
― Yara Zgheib, No Land to Light On

“The thing about knowing you’re doing something for the last time is that it takes the joy right out of it. I’ve done lots of things for the last time in my long life, but I didn’t know it.”
― Lynda Rutledge, West with Giraffes

“It is a foolish man who thinks stories do not matter—when in the end, they may be all that matter and all the forever we’ll ever know. So, shouldn’t you hear our story?”
― Lynda Rutledge, West with Giraffes

“Busy is just a euphemism for being so focused on what you don’t have that you never notice what you do.”
― Jodi Picoult, Wish You Were Here

“The places where we were born are the shape of our lives, even when we are away from them. Especially then. Now”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“They don’t mind what their kids do in life as long as they’re reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“what was “Cinderella,” if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?—”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Sure, grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“But it also seemed that every time I shared Edward’s story with someone, his hold on me diminished a little. And I didn’t want him to disappear from me; I had so little of him to hold on to.”
― Susan Meissner, A Fall of Marigolds

“Fear is worse than pain, I think. Pain is centralized, identifiable, and wanes as you wait. Fear is a heaviness you can’t wriggle out from under.”
― Susan Meissner, Secrets of a Charmed Life

“the will to stand with it and start walking. Fear does not start to fade until you take the step that you think you can’t.”
― Susan Meissner, Secrets of a Charmed Life

“guess many of us have regrets, he wrote, but my regrets seem to grow as I get older.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea

“And it seemed that my ping-pong ball could not touch his right now. We are alone in these things that we suffer.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea

“you are.”
― Laurie Lico Albanese, Hester

“when women bind themselves to passion and love? Why do men fixate on the past when every woman I have ever known is trying to remedy the present while she builds hope for what is to come?”
― Laurie Lico Albanese, Hester

“The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning and be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.”
― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace