Bibi > Bibi's Quotes

“She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest

“Everyone’s always on the hunt for a mirror. It’s basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others. Others—your sister, your parents—they want to look at you and see themselves. They want you to be a flattering reflection of them—and vice-versa. It’s normal. I suppose it’s really normal if you’re a twin. But being somebody else’s mirror? That is not your job.” Nora”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest

“Parents are temporary custodians, keeping watch and offering love and trying to leave the child better than they found him.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest

“Youth's lost companion may be the measured friend of old age, I hope", said Daniel. "I may write a poem on the subject."
"Dear God, it sounds more like a cross-stitched pillow than a poem," said Hugh.”
― helen simonson, The Summer Before the War

“Most of all I remember that what begins with drums and fife, flags and bunting, becomes too swiftly a long and grey winter of the spirit.”
― Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War

“We don’t forgive people because they deserve it,” she said. “We forgive them because we deserve it.”
― Richard Russo, Everybody's Fool

“The exercise of deciding where to go next is difficult. Because next most likely means a new forever. It means thinking about where to settle. Where to start over. During the war, their options were fewer, the stakes higher, their mission singular. It was simple, in a way. Keep your chin down, your guard up. Stay one step ahead. Stay alive for one more day. Don't let the enemy win. To think about a long-term plan feels complicated, and burdensome, like flexing an atrophied muscle.”
― Georgia Hunter, We Were the Lucky Ones

“Baths, she thought, were just like her relationships, all "ooh, ah" in the beginning and then suddenly, without warning, she had to get out, out, out!”
― Liane Moriarty, Three Wishes

“Easy for you to say," Polly said. "You've lived here all your life and stayed under the radar. No one points at you."
"Sometimes small children point at my butt," Aunt Rhea said. "But that's just on account of all the fried chicken.”
― Kathy Hepinstall, The Book of Polly

“You should have tried the eggplant parmesan she tried to hoist on me at the church bake sale. No wonder her children turned to Satan. He probably showed up as an angel of light and promised them a decent meal.”
― Kathy Hepinstall, The Book of Polly

“Furious for every moment in my life that I’d felt dismissed,”
― Sally Field, In Pieces

“How can you change who you are and learn what it takes to get up, over and over, if you can’t allow yourself to feel how much it hurts to be knocked down?”
― Sally Field, In Pieces

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. —Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera”
― Sally Field, In Pieces

“There comes a time when you don't know what your capable of anymore. Looking back, you can remember what you were capable of then, how you thought, what you did, who you loved, who people said you were. Then something happens and takes all that away, the basket of good intentions you've been toting around, the trunk of dreams you've been pulling behind you, all of its gone in an instant, and its just you, naked, bare, exposed.”
― Donna VanLiere, The Good Dream

“Who had chosen the line for her gravestone, “I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“A memoir is the lost inheritance.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood”
― Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

“By doing nothing you condone it.”
― Martha Hall Kelly, Lost Roses

“Men may leave, but books will always remain true.”
― Martha Hall Kelly, Lost Roses

“We call that guilt, dear. It’s the foundation of some of our most popular religions.”
― Martha Hall Kelly, Lost Roses

“The problem is that she is too pretty. When you are too pretty, the other parts of you do not become strong.”
― Joanne Ramos, The Farm

“You should not raise them to be too tender, like little lambs. Small lambs, soft lambs—they make the best meat; they are always devoured.”
― Joanne Ramos, The Farm

“There are some things in life you can alter–your weight, your appearance, even your name–but there are others that wishing and trying and working hard can never make any difference to. Those things are the ones that shape us. Not the things we can change, but the ones we can't.”
― C.J. tudor, The Chalk Man

“The thing you have to understand is that being a good person isn’t about singing hymns, or praying to some mystical, god. It isn’t about wearing a cross or going to church every Sunday. Being a good person is about how you treat others. A good person doesn’t need a religion, because they are content within themselves that they are doing the right thing.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Chalk Man

“For who are we if not the sum of our experiences, the things that we gather and collect in life? Once you strip those away, we become just a mass of flesh, bone, and blood vessels.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Chalk Man