Alexandra > Alexandra's Quotes

“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be in relationship?” Because you can’t always have both. You can’t cuddle up and relax with “being right” after a long day.”
― Harville Hendrix, Making Marriage Simple: Ten Relationship-Saving Truths

“A farmer is sitting on his porch in a chair, hanging out.
A friend walks up to the porch to say hello, and hears an awful yelping, squealing sound coming from inside the house.
"What's that terrifyin' sound?" asks the friend.
"It's my dog," said the farmer. "He's sittin' on a nail."
"Why doesn't he just sit up and get off it?" asks the friend.
The farmer deliberates on this and replies:
"Doesn't hurt enough yet.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“There's something tedious about disaster," Miranda said. "Don't you find? I mean, at first it's all dramatic, 'Oh my god, the economy's collapsing, there was a run on my bank so my bank ceased to exist over the weekend and got swallowed up by JPMorgan Chase,' but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, week after week, and at a certain point...”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Don't be ridiculous,' said Maya, 'You can't fail at a relationship. That's like getting off of a roller coaster and saying you failed because the ride is over. Things end. That doesn't mean the experience wasn't worth it.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“I wondered how much of the feeling of love is chemicals and cravings and dependency, and how much of the act of love is habit.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“Crazy is the space between what they tell you and what you know is true.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“We are both wounded in our own way and, like a pair of tectonic plates shifting over time, our wounds will gradually grate against one another’s, causing damage at a glacial pace. Neither of us will notice until it’s too late.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“That moment is what I love most about creating something new: the idea, the spark, the beginning, where what might have been was still what might be.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“I was supporting him when I needed support. And I was being made to feel responsible for all his problems. It was a microcosm of our entire relationship.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“Whatever your brain tells you - that you're useless, that you're broken, that you're unfixable - just hear it, acknowledge it and try to let it pass. You are not broken just because your brain says so.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“I had known he was capable of doing this. I was just too naive and too arrogant to believe he would do it to me. We all think we'll be different, don't we?”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“The point is that for a time, I was better, but I wasn’t ‘better’. We really need a better word for better.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“Rituals and routine became a safety blanket of sorts, something I could wrap around myself when things felt uncertain, which they so often did.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“For better or for worse, I am my mother's daughter, and her story is my story too. It's mine to carry, mine to hold - with love if I can manage it - and mine to weave into my own.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“He keeps conversation to a minimum, and responds to her questions in monosyllabic sentences. No matter what she says, or how hard she tries to get a rise out of him, he gives nothing in return, no hint of how it makes him feel. I recognise this behaviour- the conversational equivalent of playing dead - I've used these tactics myself in the past and it saddens me now to see how proficient Theo is in them; it takes a lot of practice to learn how not to provoke the bear. Watching Theo with his mother, I wonder if on some level I was drawn to him because his wounds look so similar to mine.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“I know that staying with him doesn't mean I'm weak. I know it wasn't my fault. I know all this. But knowing something and believing something are two very different things. And part of me still blames myself for staying.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“I sit on the balcony with the phone to my ear and as the sun makes its way slowly across the sky, I tell her everything. Not just about the pregnancy test; I tell her all the things we’re afraid to tell our mothers about our partners in case they tell us what we don’t want to hear that we already know: that we should leave them.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will. The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or supplied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE - the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“Colin Marshall says: “Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide.” If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.”
― Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered