Wendy Grover Rebmann > Wendy 's Quotes

“Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Then I understood I would never marry him. It's funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one's past, or one's clothes, but then—a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“In the darkness of the bedroom I thought of that, although thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn’t want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Memory is satisfied desire.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“You could control what you did, if you wanted to....Was it efficient? Was it productive? ...So many people didn't bother -- a kind of stupidity...a lack of vision, or purpose. Anyone who said they just woke up and found themselves in the place they'd always wanted to be was lying; and anyone who believed such a person was a fool. It was all a matter of will.”
― Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another’s hearts.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

“Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it's going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Americans see everything too simply-a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”
― Claire Messud

“I don’t believe something’s important simply because I’m told it’s important; and the inverse, perhaps more crucially, is also true: something isn’t unimportant simply because it’s been largely overlooked by others.”
― Claire Messud

“Don’t plan it, don’t overthink it, just let it happen, you’ve got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . .”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn't want to be reminded that it was fake.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren’t really feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t make the feeling go away.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I have believed in the value of knowledge and of truth. And I have believed that the quality of a life is not measured by money, celebrity, or material goods but by richness of mind, generosity of spirit, and by meaningful human relationships.”
― Claire Messud

“Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies