Taylor Barrett > Taylor's Quotes

“She didn't understand that. "How can anyone be afraid of love?"
"How can they not?" His face was completely aghast. "When you love someone... truly love them, friend or lover, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt—you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it's crippling—like having your heart carved out. It leaves you naked and exposed, wondering what you did to make them want to hurt you so badly when all you did was love them. What is so wrong with you that no one can keep faith with you? That no one can love you? To have it happen once is bad enough... but to have it repeated? Who in their right mind would not be terrified of that?”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Devil May Cry

“If I should have a daughter…“Instead of “Mom”, she’s gonna call me “Point B.” Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I’m going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.”

She’s gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.

And “Baby,” I’ll tell her “don’t keep your nose up in the air like that, I know that trick, you’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else, find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him.”

But I know that she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boats nearby, ‘cause there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix. Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks chocolate can’t fix. But that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything if you let it.

I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat, to look through a magnifying glass at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a human mind. Because that’s how my mom taught me. That there’ll be days like this, “There’ll be days like this my momma said” when you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say “thank you,” ‘cause there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away.

You will put the “wind” in win some lose some, you will put the “star” in starting over and over, and no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.

And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am pretty damn naive but I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.

“Baby,” I’ll tell her “remember your mama is a worrier but your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.”

Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and always apologize when you’ve done something wrong but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.

Your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing and when they finally hand you heartbreak, slip hatred and war under your doorstep and hand you hand-outs on street corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.”
― Sarah Kay

“If you don't want to lose your job, you become conservative, you keep your head down," he told me. "And it's pretty unfortunate, because without the willingness to fail, the possibility for great success is eliminated. [quoted from Mark Roth]”
― Sanjay Gupta, Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds

“After that experience, I decided that the things that were more important to do were the things I was actually not focused on, and I wasn't focused on them because I was pretty much afraid of failing," he says. [quoted from Mark Roth]”
― Sanjay Gupta, Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds

“The farther you go...the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it's easy to fall off.”
― Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

“Each child’s story is worthy of telling. There shouldn’t be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.”
― Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

“Hope is not a plan”
― Anderson Cooper

“Be honest about what you see, get out of the way and let the story reveal itself”
― Anderson Cooper

“Politics was his passion, but he wasn't suited for the rough-and-tumble of the game. He felt things too deeply. There was no wall between his head and his heart.”
― Anderson Cooper

“The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.”
― Anderson Cooper

“In a perfect world, I don't think it [one's sexual orientation] is anyone else's business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted.”
― Anderson Cooper

“I’d wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion.”
― Anderson Cooper, Cursed by the Chance

“I don't like anything that scares me, and I prefer to face it head on and get over it. Anyone who says they're not scared is a fool, a liar or both. I just don't want that fear in my stomach to be part of my life, so I work to eliminate it.”
― Anderson Cooper

“But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It's got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet's tectonic plates -hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents - but thy can't plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts.
The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole”
― Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
― John Green

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”
― John Green

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”
― John Green

“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars