Francesca Costa > Francesca's Quotes

“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”
― Georges Simenon

“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
― Anais Nin

“I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“In growing older, we become our parents.”
― Julien Green

“Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”
― Banana Yoshimoto

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“Your questions are false if you already know the answer.”
― jose saramago

“Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.”
― José Saramago

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sometimes I feel dead," I told her, "and I hate everybody.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that you don't need anyone, you can take care of yourself.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“It's that hope for happiness that consumes a woman day after day, destroys her.”
― Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook

“Often, faced with men's bad moods, I wonder what they would do if instead of only their office job they had, like every woman, so many different problems to confront and solve.”
― Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook