Clare Pooley > Clare Pooley's Quotes

“The truth often isn't pretty. It's not aspirational. It doesn't fit neatly into a little square on Instagram.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Only a really great friend realises that there are few situations that can’t be improved by great stationery.”
― Clare Pooley, The Sober Diaries: The brave and brilliantly funny memoir that is changing lives, the perfect read for Dry January

“Then he’d discovered that routines were crucial. They created buoys he could cling to to keep himself afloat.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“When we first come here in 1973, two men came to restaurant and say, ‘Go back to China and take your filthy, foreign food with you.’ I say, ‘You are angry. Anger comes from stomach. Sit. I bring you soup. For free. It will make you feel better.’ They ate my wonton soup. Recipe from my grandmother. They have been customers of restaurant for forty years. Meet force with softness. Recipe for life. Now you understand.” And, strangely, he did.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Hazard noted Monica’s use of a colon. It looked a little incongruous. He didn’t think people did grammar anymore. They barely did writing. Just texts, and emojis.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“He had the rather uncomfortable feeling that he only really existed in the eye of the beholder, that when he stopped being noticed, he actually stopped being. Did that make him horribly shallow? And if so, did it matter?”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Tai chi is about the balance of yin and yang. If you use hardness to resist force, then both sides will break. Tai chi meets hardness with softness, so incoming force exhausts itself. It is philosophy for life also. You understand?”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“That’s the thing about the wine witch. She cuts brilliant lives short, and ensures that others are only half lived. She makes children grow up thinking it is normal for adults to drink all evening, every evening. She fixes it so mothers are woken up in the middle of the night by a stranger telling them their only child was found dead in a ditch, next to someone she barely knew.”
― Clare Pooley, The Sober Diaries: The brave and brilliantly funny memoir that is changing lives, the perfect read for Dry January

“Meet force with softness. Recipe for life. Now you understand.’ And, strangely, he did.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“How much time did her ovaries have left? Were they already packing their suitcases for a relaxing retirement on the Costa Brava?”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Perhaps the compulsion to fill every inch of space was because it made him feel less alone,”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“How extraordinary that she had been envying Monica’s life, when all the time all Monica wanted was what she took most for granted.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Mother is a verb, not a noun.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Besides,’ continued Julian, ‘you can slam down a phone like that. You can’t slam down a mobile. Imagine, a whole generation who’ll never know the joy of slamming down a phone.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“You have such energy. You're like the sun. When you're interested in someone, you turn your rays towards them and they luxuriate in your warmth. But then you turn somewhere else, leaving them in the shadow, and they spend all their energy trying to recreate the memory of your light.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Tai chi meets hardness with softness, so incoming force exhausts itself. It is philosophy for life also.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Preparation is the key to effective spontaneity.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Surely it would be better to live a messy, flawed, sometimes not very pretty life that was real and honest, than to constantly try to live up to a life of perfection that was actually a sham?”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“She thought of all her new friends, with their lives that didn’t look beautiful on an Instagram square, yet who were so much deeper, stronger and more interesting than that.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“Darling, what is the point of being alive if you go through life unnoticed, without standing out and making waves?”
― Clare Pooley, The People on Platform 5

“They want us to be small, so we have to stand tall. They want us to be invisible, so we have to be seen. They want us to be quiet, so we have to be heard. They want us to surrender, so we have to fight.”
― Clare Pooley, The People on Platform 5