Beth > Beth's Quotes

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“People don't save other people. People save themselves.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

“People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they don't. And it doesn't matter if the sickness is cancer or if it's depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop. Sometimes the alternative stuff works and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you wonder if no outside interference makes any difference at all; if an illness is like a storm, if it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, depending on how robust you are, you will be alive. Or you will be dead.”
― Marian Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings