Annabel > Annabel's Quotes

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that is the focus of the story we need – connection.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren't able to burn.”
― Tish Thawer, The Witches of BlackBrook

“I'm conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that's most exclusively mine. The one thing that brings me the deepest joy.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“I’m conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that’s most exclusively mine. The one that brings me the deepest joy.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“I can’t really talk about it, but we’ve just got the English language rights for a really prestigious Swedish author. And everybody has been clamouring to read her debut novel, which is being billed as A Hundred Years of Solitude meets Gone Girl. But there was a lot of debate amongst the team over whether to give it an English title or stick with the Swedish original, and it all wound up being sorted out very last minute and so now the book’s gone to press as I’m Out of the Office at the Moment. Please Forward Any Translation Work to My Personal Email Address.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“He thought he was going to cry again, but since he’d done it twice in as many days, he decided it was probably best if he tried to be a man for a little while. Then he thought that was sexist, so he allowed another tear to spill onto his cheek. Nick was—and always would be—invested in dismantling the patriarchy. Tumblr had taught him that.”
― T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries

“No one who started a sentence with 'well, well, well' ever wanted something nice.”
― T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
― Bertrand Russell, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays

“My father did not become the bad guy for me. Not yet. That day I hated my mother for killing my father, but also for all the reasons you cannot say. Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“… my mother said to me, You love your father better, and that is all right. I thought she was being petty, but suddenly I could call up the pain in her eyes. The unfairness that I thought he was the better of the two of them.
My father did not love one family more than the other. It was that he didn’t care about either more than he cared about himself.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Animal

“In the absence of relief, a young person’s natural response—their only response, really—is to repress and disconnect from the feeling-states associated with suffering. One no longer knows one’s body. Oddly, this self-estrangement can show up later in life in the form of an apparent strength, such as my ability to perform at a high level when hungry or stressed or fatigued, pushing on without awareness of my need for pause, nutrition, or rest.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Time after time it was the “nice” people, the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness in my family practice, or who came under my care at the hospital palliative ward I directed.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Feeling valued and known are also part of this belonging. If a family claims you as their own but you don’t really feel that they know you or see you for who you are, you’ll feel like an outsider within your own family.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second): How to Recognize ... Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect

“Society often accepts difference in children, but it’s not ‘acceptance’ so much as it is a confidence that those differences will fade.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“It's uncomfortable that this isn't all good or all bad or a happy ending or a sad ending, but just a mess that everyone muddled through. It's very painful to start loving someone when holding on to the idea of hating them keeps you safe.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“because everybody knows that happily is never really ever after. The truth is buried in the phrase itself, if you look it up. The original version was “happy in the ever after,” which meant something like “hey, everybody dies and goes to heaven in the end, so does it really matter what miseries and disasters befall us on this mortal plane?” Cut out two little words, cover the gap with an -ly, and voilà: The inevitability of death is replaced by the promise of endless, rosy life.”
― Alix E. Harrow, A Mirror Mended

“Maybe because it never occurred to me that it could be enough just to live, as happily as you can, for as long as you have.”
― Alix E. Harrow, A Mirror Mended

“I’ve found that fairy tale locks are inclined to pop open at the first sign of narrative agency).”
― Alix E. Harrow, A Mirror Mended