Nadia > Nadia's Quotes

“At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments. I run around in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage. I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong. I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die.

You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

“I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn't need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I'd written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic. As George Benson had stressed in Then Joy Breaks Through, the experience of growth and self-realization, even of ecstatic joy, were natural processes available to believers and nonbelievers alike. And so I declared private war on stagnation and committed myself privately to personal growth. The Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

“Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

“Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days - spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive - I was probably most afraid of my parents.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

“My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“The half-life of love is forever.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”
― Junot Diaz

“You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."

[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]”
― Junot Diaz

“You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.”
― Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.”
― Anais Nin

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
― Anais Nin

“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
― Anais Nin

“From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”
― Anais Nin

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I'm stable. ”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers – everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it´s actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any. Because you are not even there.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Wherever I go, I meet myself.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape

“I visited many places,
Some of them quite
Exotic and far away,
But I always returned to myself.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“When I was your age I knew nothing about the world or my place in it. I figured I'd be someone's wife, then someone's mother. It never occurred to me to be someone myself.”
― Wendy Mass, Every Soul a Star

“I give myself sometimes admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.”
― Mary Wortley Montagu

“I believed, when I entered this convent,
I was escaping from myself, but alas,
poor me, I brought myself with me! ”
― Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz