Mandy > Mandy's Quotes

“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie Du Mariage: Ou Meditations De Philosophie Eclectique, Sur Le Bonheur Et Le Malheur Conjugal

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Owe, owe, owe. You use that word so much. A family is not a credit card.”
― Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

“If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read.”
― Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

“This works to spoil films too: the highest-profile actor with the fewest lines is always the villain, and a sudden wide-shot of a character crossing a road means they are about to be hit by a car. A good author must not only wrong-foot the reader within the narrative, they must do it within the form of the novel itself. There are clues baked into the very object.”
― Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

“Words that no one valued, spoken by women that no one would have remembered if she hadn’t written their names on slips of paper. I put it in my reading pile.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“When we bound these books, I thought, they were identical. But I realised they couldn’t stay that way. As soon as someone cracks the spine, a book develops a character all its own. What impresses or concerns one reader is never the same as what impresses or concerns all others. So, each book, once read, will fall open at a different place. Each book, once read, I realised, will have told a slightly different story.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“The words used to describe us define our value to society and determine our capacity to contribute. They also’ – and again she poked at the translations – ‘tell others how to feel about us, how to judge us.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“The story of her life etched on her skin… She’s like a walking book. Patterns and portraits and words. Mantras of love and power. I wonder how much of it is fiction. What story would I tell if I had to wear it on my body?”
― Sulari Gentill, The Woman in the Library

“People use the expression ‘heartbroken’ so often it has lost its meaning. For me, it was as though my heart actually broke into a thousand pieces when I lost my daughter, and I haven’t been able to feel or really care about anything else ever since. It didn’t just break my heart, it broke me, and I am no longer the same person. I’m someone else now.”
― Alice Feeney, His and Hers

“Nikki, I'm not valuable because I'm employed. And I'm not valuable because others value me. I'm valuable because I value myself.”
― Shankari Chandran

“A middle-aged woman’s midlife crisis does, I know, pose a dramaturgical problem. In my observation—and as many experts I’ve spoken with have affirmed—women’s crises tend to be quieter than men’s. Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular—a big affair, a new career, a “she shed” in the backyard—but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis

“In my experience, Gen X women spend lots of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“Gen X women had sky-high expectations for themselves. The contrast between our “you can be anything” indoctrination and the stark realities encountered in midlife—when you might, despite your best efforts, not be able to find a partner or get pregnant or save for retirement or own your own home or find a job with benefits—has made us feel like failures at the exact moment when we most require courage. It takes our bodies longer to recover from a night of drinking and it takes our spirits longer to bounce back from rejection. We may wind up asking questions like the one my friend posed to me the other night: “Do you think my life is ever going to be good again?”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis

“It should be plenty to raise children or to have a career—or, frankly, just not to become a serial killer. Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis

“In my experience, there is only one thing worse for a woman’s mental health than trying to be a superhero, and that is being told to “chill”—especially since any efforts to do so incur swift blowback.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis

“Anyone desperate enough to escape can lose themselves in the delicious twists of novels, allow themselves to be transported into the bodies of wild women or small hungry boys, taken to strange cities or enchanted woods, dropped into wartime or the end of times.”
― Georgia Harper, What I Would Do to You

“Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Every person is just a story that everyone around them writes on them. When we meet new people, the story changes.”
― Gina Chick, We Are the Stars

“I spent so long as a child wondering how to leave my strangeness behind, and it turns out it’s the wisest part of me.”
― Gina Chick, We Are the Stars

“Humans don’t fall in love with the person; we fall in love with the lesson they’re here to teach us. When that lesson is done, it’s done.”
― Gina Chick, We Are the Stars