Olivia Benoit > Olivia's Quotes

“There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.”
― Marilynne Robinson (Author), Gilead

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it.”
― Marilynne Robinson (Author), Gilead

“Thank God for girlfriends. In this crazy, chaotic, divided world that was run by men, you could count on the women.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Women

“Maybe some things transcend reciprocity. Maybe not everything is about having.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Bride

“Our minds and hearts are well built to perform certain tasks, and poorly designed for others. We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“It hurts to want it all, so many things that can't coexist within the same life.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care and not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain.”
― Marilynne Robinson (Author), Gilead

“I don't want to think about all the things that would be different if I'd stayed. It's too hard to pick apart what I might have gained from what I would have lost.”
― Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

“Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we act as starry-eyed as Margaret Keane paintings about the eternal sunshine of the spotless female mind. It's as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly, and we all did. Some more than others.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“I have reasons to feel forever grateful to my fake teenage girlfriends, for aside from teaching me about junk food, they taught me how to be feminine. Snuggled in their blossoming Love's Baby Soft-scented bosoms, I learned to approximate a female--how to talk, how to walk, how to dance, how to flip your hair. How to part your lips for a kiss but not for a bite of food. How to end your declarative sentences in a question. How to twitch your hips as you left a room. Why you laugh when you feel like screaming. Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It's not important that it's real. It's only important that it's tasty.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“Don’t tell Mam about this, he says. Marianne shakes her head. No, she agrees. But it wouldn’t matter if she did tell her, not really. Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn’t of any interest to her, which in a way it isn’t. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter’s frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks “warmth,” by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.”
― Marilynne Robinson (Author), Gilead

“There won't ever be an us, but he'll never forget me.”
― Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

“He leans forward, twisting his ring. 'You do that a lot,' I say. Will assesses me from the corner of his eye. 'Who gave it to you?' 'My grandmother,' he says after a moment. 'It was my grandfather's.' 'You were close.' 'With my grandmother, yeah. You remember?' A hint of a smile graces his lips, and I want to hook my thumbs on the corner of his mouth and pull the edges up higher. 'Of course,' I say quietly. 'I remember everything.”
― Carley Fortune, Meet Me at the Lake

“The future was a mystery, after all, that was true. Within its infinite folds it contained the possibility, however remote, that she might still be salvaged, her body, from the wreck of all her wasted years. In his arms, to be given life, yes, and to give life also. Impossible of course to think: and yet it happened all the time. May have been happening even then, concealed inaccessibly inside her breathing body. Each generation that had gone before, hundreds, thousands. The only answer to death, she thought: to echo back its name in that way, with all th same intensity and senseless, on the side of life. Why not allow him, why not allow herself, at least the idea, the image, the future, at once impossible and not, enveloping them both in its mystery in the dark stillness of her quiet bedroom, descending them both into the depths of sleep.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Well, we spent a good many days on the edge of disaster, and we laughed about it for years. It was always the worst parts that made us laugh.”
― Marilynne Robinson (Author), Gilead

“I still miss him and it hurts and I wish he would come back and be okay and love me and not hurt me again," Ethan says, all in one breath, like it's a relief to say the words. "There were good parts. There were tiny little parts of a good person and I miss having hope that those parts would take over.”
― Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

“If you're in survival mode you can keep problems buried, because the way you grew up, that wasn't okay. When you upend your life, you don't have to sit with how unfair it was. And whatever drama you come up with won't be worse than the anger and hurt you're carrying around, because that was the original hurt. That's the deepest cut.”
― Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

“In this particular era of neoliberal capitalism, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“Being with so many people felt right, and afterward at the wake thrown by Nathan's company at a huge bar in Paddington overlooking the canal, with seats outside and bottomless champagne and a playlist put together by Nathan's best friends and the children dashing about in summer clothes, and lively urgent chatter and laughter and people looking their high summer best, it felt almost as if Nathan would appear at any moment, in his element, loving every second, and when he didn't appear it felt as though maybe he was at home waiting for her, and when he as not at home waiting for her it felt as though maybe he was away on a boys' trip and when, ten days after the funeral, he is still not home, it is then and only then that Alix collapses. She lies on her bed, the day before Eliza's first day at secondary school, wearing her artichoke dress and clutching a pillow, arching and un-arching her back as spasms and agonized crying rack her body at the realization of what she has lost.”
― Lisa Jewell, None of This Is True

“(On religion) "I think it lets us off the hook. I think it teaches us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; the ultimately, we're not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“With Alex, my fortress of solitude grew a Juliet balcony. The balcony became a balustrade, the balustrade a veranda. Before I knew it, the fortress was open, and soft winds blew past gossamer curtains. My heart had become a home, and I did not live there alone.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“The real villain is love: an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay. And it will forever go unpunished.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“Annie used to have a funny theory: we all have a Year Zero around which the calendars of our lives pivot. At some point you meet someone, and they become so important, so metamorphic, that ten, twenty, sixty-five years down the line you look back and realize that you could split your existence in two. Before they showed (BCE), and your Common Era. Your very own Gregorian calendar.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“At first, it seemed as if it were a happy situation. As the months wore on, I realized that, rather than enjoying a peaceable fling, my father was feasting on melodrama. He seemed to mistake passion for love, and insanity for passion. This is never a good thing to learn about one's father. As I saw my father's mistress grow more and more needy, making outrageous demands and late-night phone calls, I recognized something fundamental about my parents' relationship. I realized had my mother never given rein to her rare but scarlet-tipped fights of rage, he'd had left her long ago. Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman's love. Some people grow together like horrible species of lichen. My parents, I learned, were precisely this kind of symbiotic organism.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“It is spring and a breeze is ruffling our hair like loving fingers. We sit so close together that we constantly brush against each other. We touch each other with the casualness that love allows.”
― Laura Nowlin, If He Had Been With Me

“The main thing that youth has going for it is porpoise-tight skin. Raw, wide-eyed newness is meaningless. Nostalgia for knowing nothing is asinine; you can't recapture it and you don't want to relive it. Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger's heart.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.”
― Dean Koontz, Velocity