Danielle > Danielle's Quotes

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come”
― William Wordsworth

“(a deprivation that, in truth, was not so much a daily trial of living as a suffocating flatness of life),”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.” —W. C. Fields”
― A.K. Alexander, Blood and Roses

“Age is always advancing and I'm fairly sure it's up to no good.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You can’t plan for everything or you never get started in the first place.”
― Jim Butcher, Changes

“We do stuff even though we’re scared.”  The warrior’s creed at its most basic.”
― Debora Geary, A Dangerous Witch

“Make a difference,” she said.  “Love.  Be loved.  And be happy.” ”
― Dan Koontz, The I.P.O.

“When we open our hearts to what is, it generates a level of warmth that helps heal our wounds.”
― Kristin Neff, Fierce Self-Compassion: How to Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Your Power, and Thrive

“When we buy into the narrative that we’re running the show, we forget our essential interdependence—the truth that all our actions are carried out in a larger web of causes and conditions.”
― Kristin Neff, Fierce Self-Compassion: How to Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Your Power, and Thrive

“When we open to the reality of what is, even if we don’t like what is, it helps almost immediately.”
― Kristin Neff, Fierce Self-Compassion: How to Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Your Power, and Thrive

“what’s more important than the intensity of the challenge you face in life is how you relate to yourself in the midst of it.”
― Kristin Neff, Fierce Self-Compassion: How to Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Your Power, and Thrive

“To childless people, children were a logistical problem to be solved: find a way to pay for and arrange childcare, and you were free. They didn’t understand that even when you weren’t with your child, the child continued to exist in a part of your brain that you had to consciously work to silence, or as a low hum of anxiety that colored everything. Either way, you were fucked. Either way, pleasure and creativity were sacrificed entirely, or only permitted in small doses.”
― Emily Gould, Perfect Tunes

“During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight. FRITJOF CAPRA PHYSICIST”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“Any extended period or piece of work draws heavily on our artistic well. Overtapping the well, like overfishing the pond, leaves us with diminished resources. We fish in vain for the images we require. Our work dries up and we wonder why, “just when it was going so well.” The truth is that work can dry up because it is going so well. As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them—to restock the trout pond, so to speak. I call this process filling the well.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“This brain is reached through rhythm—through rhyme, not reason.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.”
― Julia Cameron

“Rather than working or living the now, we spin our wheels and indulge in daydreams of could have, would have, should have. One of the great misconceptions about the artistic life is that it entails great swathes of aimlessness. The truth is that a creative life involves great swathes of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge. STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“Artist Dates are a necessary frivolity.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“A first draft is seldom appropriately shown to any but the most gentle and discerning eye. It often takes another artist to see the embryonic work that is trying to sprout. The inexperienced or harsh critical eye, instead of nurturing the shoot of art into being, may shoot it down instead.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“Remember that even if you have made a truly rotten piece of art, it may be a necessary stepping-stone to your next work. Art matures spasmodically and requires ugly-duckling growth stages.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. EUGÈNE DELACROIX”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity