Candy Tiley > Candy's Quotes

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”
― John Cage

“I am content; that is a blessing greater than riches; and he to whom that is given need ask no more.”
― Henry Fielding

“Some people are moulded by their aspirations, others by their hostilities.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“The boys had grown since I’d last seen them. I wouldn’t have recognized them in a group, but I find that the older I get, the more kids just look like kids. I don’t really notice them as much as I used to. On the other hand, I could have instantly picked Harry out of a lineup of similarly marked German shepherds, were there ever a need to do so. Harry was a wonderful character. The boys were just boys.”
― Ann Leary, The Good House

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.”
― Mark Twain

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.”
― Stanley Fish

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Always live your life with your biography in mind.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“when there’s lightning, don’t stand alone or think you’ll be protected by hiding in the trees. Find the nearest ditch and lie as low in it as you can.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Blow Fly

“nothing worse than someone who's stupid and arrogant and has power.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Blow Fly

“No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional, flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into ...”
― Anne Lamott

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“I like to stack them up on the shelf and move them about and rearrange them according to new parameters-height, color, thickness, provenance, publisher, author's nationality, subject matter, likelihood that I will ever read them. Then I put them back the way they were.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“You know, Grace, it's queer but I don't feel narrow. I feel broad. How can I explain it to you, so you would understand? I've seen everything...and I've hardly been away from this yard....
I've been part of the beginning and part of the growth. I've married...and borne children and looked into the face of death. Is childbirth narrow, Grace? Or marriage? Or death? When you've experienced all those things, Grace, the spirit has traveled although the body has been confined. I think travel is a rare privilege and I'm glad you can have it. But not every one who stays at home is narrow and not every one who travels is broad. I think if you can understand humanity...can sympathize with every creature...can put yourself into the personality of every one...you're not narrow...you're broad.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A Lantern in Her Hand

“Stop right there,' I said. 'If we're going to have rules, the main rule is that you never ask me about my private life: not my books, not my TV, not my family, not my friends.'
'I'm interested you put them in that order...”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder