Beth Cothron > Beth's Quotes

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“But how you feel love and understand love are two different things. Now, so many years down the road, I recognize that I was alone and adrift and that he was lonely in the way that only a ladies’ man can be. He reminded me of Atlanta, and I reminded him of the same. All these were reasons why we were drawn to each other, but standing with him outside of Maroons, we were past reason. Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“I am not generally a wearer of perfume, preferring to smell of plain soap and my natural musk, but, were it possible to purchase a bottle in which the scent of new pencil shavings and the petroleum reek of a freshly rubbed eraser were combined, I would happily douse myself with it on a daily basis.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is decide to leave when it is no longer wise to stay.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“Youthful ideals are easy to believe until you’re faced with tough choices involving love, disappointment, and commitment.”
― Jamie Beck, Before I Knew

“I often feel much less lonely when I’m by myself than I do with other people.”
― Alethea Black, You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir

“maybe you should just make a giant cardboard sign to wear the next time you see her that reads “I DON’T CARE.”
― Alethea Black, You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir

“I’m feeling in awe of the idea that no human being can ever fall so low that God won’t welcome him back immediately, with open arms, if only he repents.”
― Alethea Black, You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir

“No one advertises what the hours are for this job called motherhood, but you can report that the hours are terrible. You don’t usually like to drink before noon, but the first day, after only six hours alone with the screaming baby, come lunchtime you find yourself eyeing the Sancerre in the fridge.”
― Alethea Black, You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir

“She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous. What starts out linear becomes geometric. You do the right thing and then you do the next right thing. Over time it adds up, and the geometric potential of success is unleashed.”
― Gary Keller, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

“When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn’t actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business.”
― Gary Keller, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

“Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was, and she could see him there.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Suzanne understood there were three options for dealing with time pressure. Option One: Perform tasks more efficiently. Move faster, triple-task, cut corners. Buy cookies instead of making them from scratch, and ignore the raised eyebrows or direct complaints from better, more efficient mothers. Drive faster and risk a speeding ticket with scheduling repercussions rippling for days afterward. Text at stoplights but not in front of the kids. Sleep less.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“No one gives in without giving something up, and nothing is given up without cost.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“To be free of the needs and expectations of others; to enjoy self-determination; to take a course of action—or even a single step—without weighing the impact on those around her. To be selfish.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Because it’s the people we make our lives with that make our lives. Not our careers or titles or bank accounts.”
― Melanie Summers, The Royal Delivery

“I had recently read that making it through mothering alive required putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. Alas—I had failed to make the connection between survival and sunscreen.”
― Camille Pagán, I'm Fine and Neither Are You

“Upset? Upset was realizing your best black dress was now several shades of maroon because you had entrusted the laundry to your husband, who had confirmed your long-standing suspicion that high standardized test scores had an inverse relationship to practical intelligence.”
― Camille Pagán, I'm Fine and Neither Are You

“A man earns a little money,” Jim continued, “he makes a few good decisions, and he kicks back, thinks he’s infallible. Like it’s going to come easy. When a woman gets some success, it’s never enough. She’s already looking for the next challenge. All I’m saying is if I see two equally qualified people, I’d choose the woman every time.”
― Claire Gibson, Beyond the Point

“I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open.”
― Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life

“Night shifts were brutal but easier to schedule around. Sometimes, it was just less painful to forgo sleep than to try to find child care for all the early dismissals and vacations and holidays and staff developments and parent-teacher conference days. It was also true that nights in the ER were often more peaceful than nights at home with her family. Sometimes they even involved less blood.”
― Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is

“The novelist in me is inspired by how much raising children is like writing books: You don’t know where they’re going until they get there. You may think you do, but you’re probably wrong. Corralling and forcing them against their will to go where you first imagined they would isn’t going to work for anyone involved. Never mind you’re the one writing and raising them, they are headed in their own direction, independent of you. And scary though that is, it’s also how it should be.”
― Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is

“What you see is what you get,” she said years later. “People who worry about their hair all the time, frankly, are boring.”
― Susan Page, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

“We get our time in the spotlight, if you will. And then, and some point, it’s time to get off the stage.”
― Melanie Lageschulte, Songbird Season

“He wasn’t writing to win a prize. The writing itself was his reward.”
― Jamie Beck, The Promise of Us

“In the simplest terms, emotional intelligence is the ability or skill to be intelligent about emotions.”
― Brandon Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: For a Better Life, success at work, and happier relationships. Improve Your Social Skills, Emotional Agility and Discover Why it Can Matter More Than IQ.

“You can’t assume everything’s okay inside the house just because the paint isn’t peeling and the yard is neatly mowed.”
― Emily Bleeker, When I'm Gone

“Power and love didn’t often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around — and why his parents will always wave back. ~ William D. Tammeus”
― Inglath Cooper, Blue Wide Sky