Sabeen > Sabeen's Quotes

“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

“Love her but leave her wild.”
― Atticus

“The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty. But she never deigned to speak to me, so this apprehension gradually wore off. And I told myself I didn’t have anything to feel guilty about: we were both near-adults, responsible for our own actions, who had freely entered into a relationship which hadn’t worked out. No one had got pregnant, no one had got killed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you. I leave a precise diagnosis to the headshrinkers—which might vary according to the day of the week—and merely note her inability to imagine anyone else’s feelings or emotional life. Even her own mother warned me against her.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The question of accumulation,” Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack—there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Or, to put it another way. Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual lives? To die when something new is being born—even if that something new is our very own self? Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I didn’t really understand why I asked these questions. I suppose I wanted to do something normal, or at least pretend that something was normal even if it wasn’t. When you’re young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The shedding of skin, rebirth. Animals, birds and insects can provide such useful insights. If I’m ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, “What would a ferret do?” or, “How would a salamander respond to this situation?” Invariably, I find the right answer.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“If you’re reading this now, and you’re eighteen, or younger, get your ass up and go hug your parents and thank them. You don’t have to mean it; just say it. And if you’re older than that, call them and say, “I get it, Ma. I get it, Daddy.” It’s a cold world without your parents, the two people who unconditionally love you.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“It took until I was his age then to realize what my dad was going through. His wife just had a stroke and left him with these two kids. He had not been involved in the day-to-day as much as my mom had. My mom wasn’t my friend; she was my mom. She loved me, and we had fun together, but she was my mother. She knew what I was going through because she paid more attention to that stuff—being tall, getting bullied, not fitting in—and she was more involved because she was more connected to the school stuff. She was so good with me, and I knew that I could sometimes take advantage of that. She was just happy if I was happy. I often feel guilty about how I treated her. I know how much she worried about me.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“To this day, if someone swims in my pool, they have to sign a waiver that they won’t pee in it. If they pee in my pool, they’re peeing in my life, and I won’t have that.)”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“I was more afraid to not try comedy than to try it. This shit right here is calling me, I thought.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“Human mating rituals are unbelievably tedious to observe. At least in the animal kingdom you are occasionally treated to a flash of bright feathers or a display of spectacular violence. Hair flicking and play fights don’t quite cut the mustard.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Save for the exquisite oeuvre of a certain Mr. Lomond, I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I looked at myself again. I was healthy and my body was strong. I had a brain that worked fine, and a voice, albeit an unmelodious one; smoke inhalation all those years ago had damaged my vocal cords irreparably. I had hair, ears, eyes and a mouth. I was a human woman, no more and no less.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I felt a little glow inside—not a blaze, more like a small, steady candle.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Death had given me the courage. Death helped me not be scared to say my truth. There was no fucking around anymore. No one was going to tell me what to do. Everyone had died; I figured I would die, too. If they don’t want no more Joneses in the world, I might as well go for it! Death gave me a new perspective. Death gave me everything.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“I got SNL! I got SNL!” I screamed over and over and over again. He looked at me puzzled. “What the fuck is SNL?” he said. This is the hood. He didn’t know Saturday Night Live—he probably thought SNL was slang for some kind of strange venereal disease. But from then on, he would know what SNL was. Leslie Fucking Jones had just gotten the job of a lifetime, and nothing would ever be the same again.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“Partly I had that attitude because I was the oldest on the cast, and partly it was because of what I’d been through. After my brother died, I just abused myself. I dated terrible guys, did all kinds of stupid shit. I thought, The world has killed everybody anyway… In a way, SNL kind of saved me a little bit (as did a really great new therapist in New York)—I had work to do, so I just did it.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“That day, I remember sitting on the couch thinking, If I was twenty-seven, this shit would be fucking me up right now. But when it happened, I was forty-eight and a soldier. Did they think that they were going to computer-scare me? I’m not going to lie—it hurt for a second, because it was absolute evil. We have evil people in the world, and this is a sure sign of it, and it’s terrifying that people can behave this way. But I know I haven’t done anything wrong. Yes, I will have to explain to my aunt why my vagina is all over the internet, but these photographs are my personal property, as is my vagina.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“(I’ll never forget Prince being on SNL; at one point he saw me to the side of the stage and because the room was dark, he thought I was Chris Rock. I know that because he called me Chris Rock.)”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“I didn’t discover that I was special at SNL—I was always that. I just had not fully owned it. And that’s the frustration with this industry—you have to fight for that freedom, and when you do, sometimes it’s a problem, especially if they want to take your magic and use it the way they want you to use it. Or they just try to own your magic, or wring the fuck out of it, or try to copy it. Or they will try to make you think they discovered your magic.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“And you got to be willing to walk away from something that is not for you, no matter how big it is. I don’t stay anywhere I’m not wanted. I don’t let people misuse me anymore—I don’t have to. My talent can take me anywhere I want to go. I’m not conceited or cocky. I’m just convinced.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“In the end, what I learned in the pandemic, and since, is what so many of us learned: life is life. It’s not supposed to be easy all the time, and it’s never as easy as we want it to be. But live through your trauma, stop running from yourself—you are your best friend. Think about it—would you let someone hurt your best friend? No. Do the same for yourself. You will get the biggest reward: happiness, even in a storm. Grant yourself some grace because life can be short, but it can be long as fuck, too. You wake up every day and you hope you make it back to your bed safely. You hope you get good sleep, and you hope you wake the fuck up. That’s it.”
― Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones

“I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I’d made my legs black, and my hair blond. I’d lengthened and darkened my eyelashes, dusted a flush of pink onto my cheeks and painted my lips a shade of dark red which was rarely found in nature. I should, by rights, look less like a human woman than I’d ever done, and yet it seemed that this was the most acceptable, the most appropriate appearance that I’d ever made before the world. It was puzzling. I supposed I could have gone further—made my skin glow with tanning agent, scented myself with a spray made from chemicals manufactured in a laboratory, distilled from plants and animal parts.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine