Amanda Baker > Amanda's Quotes

“Friends,” Andrew says, the candlelight hitting his braces just so. “It’s true, we all rage. We all hate. We all fail. But . . .” And here, he raises a finger, pausing for dramatic effect, something he learned at his Toastmasters group. “That rage and contempt, that disappointment, that’s what makes us yearn so hard. Those deficits, they make us reach, they stretch us. They make us fight back when it matters.”
― Jonathan Evison, Lawn Boy

“All life includes loss. It's taken me many, many years to learn to deal with that, and I don't expect I'll ever be fully resigned to it. But that doesn't mean we have to turn away from the world, or stop striving for the best that we can do and be. We owe that much to ourselves, at least, and we deserve whatever measure of good may come of it.”
― Ken Grimwood, Replay

“Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“I'm done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“The boy with no direction taught me something unforgettable: happiness comes again if you let it.”
― Adam Silvera, More Happy Than Not

“Everything's a risk. Not doing anything is a risk. It's up to you.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

“When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I'm jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they're trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“The great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Our memories of our loved ones are the pearl we form around the grain of grief that causes us pain.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“Night descends as a falling blanket. The city is a constellation of lights, each one representing a hand that turned the lightbulb. A hand attached to a mind containing a universe of memories and myths; a natural history of loves and wounds.
Life everywhere. Pulsing, humming. A great wheel turning. A light blinks out here, one replaces it there. Always dying. Always living. We survive until we don’t.
All of this ending and beginning is the only thing that is infinite.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“Your joy brought something back for me. You will see, when you have your own children—it is as if they are your new eyes and your new heart, and you feel sometimes you can live for a hundred years more, even after all the trouble you've seen. You actually want to live for a hundred years more, even knowing how cruel the world is.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“We can't attack a thing we don't know. That's dangerous. And...foolish. It would be like trying to chop down a tree from the top of it. If we understand how the tree works, how the trunk and roots are where the power lies, and how gravity is on our side, we can attack it, each of us with small axes, and change the face of the the forest.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You