Selena > Selena's Quotes

“And the weather was so damn sick of being predictable; I heard it began snowing in the Sahara and I wanted to tell you that I've changed.”
― Lang Leav

“Once you'd resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

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

“The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“We walk around carrying Closed signs around our necks while we press Open to our chests and wonder why the doorbell never rings.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I didn't know that would be the last time I'd see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner's neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous