What Kind of Paradise Quotes

“Never underestimate the power of love to lead you down the path toward willful blindness. Faith in the people you adore doesn’t disappear slowly, with each tiny disappointment; instead, it collapses all at once, like the final snowfall that triggers an avalanche when the weight suddenly becomes too much to bear.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“We are undone by the specificity of our dreams. Reality can never live up to the shining edifices we forge inside our fantasies: Life, in all its confusing complexity, is destined to be a disappointment in comparison. The lottery winner discovers that the riches don’t equal happiness; the longed-for baby is colicky and sour; losing fifty pounds still doesn’t bring you love; winning the election doesn’t trigger societal change. Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment, seeking some sort of equilibrium.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Sometimes love manifests itself as a kind of amazed awe, as potent a feeling as any other form of connection: the shock of knowing that you are desired just as you are, no matter how broken you might feel.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“I believe that civilization’s path is a pendulum that swings both ways, vacillating between hope and despair, success and failure, and all we can do is hang on for dear life. Because it will never, ever stop.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Sometimes it’s not about either/or but about learning how to manage the complexities of both/and.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Memory is a fickle beast. So often we choose what we want to remember; but sometimes memories choose us. The memories we most want to forget are the ones that fold themselves into our subconscious, waiting until we least expect them to rise up and pinch us tight in their talons.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Listening to one voice, and one voice only, doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a parrot.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment,”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Damage is hard to undo once it’s done.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“The irony, of course, is that kids believe that knowledge unlocks happiness. More than anything, they crave access to all the things that they aren’t supposed to know yet; as if being privy to the secrets of the world will open up some magical door to adulthood. They believe that if you know, you will understand. But in fact, the opposite is true. The more you come to know about the world, the less it makes sense; and the more you wish you could just climb right back inside your mother’s arms and hide there, an oblivious kid, forever.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“My father was a brilliant philosopher king, the benevolent ruler of our tranquil domain; or he was a tyrant, a maniac, and a menace. My life was bucolic and happy; or it was bizarre and lonely. Which is true? Is it possible it could be both? The more I seek clarity, the more entangled and confused my recollections become. So let’s start by focusing on facts.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Once you’re aware of something’s existence, you can’t will it back into oblivion, no matter how hard you try.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Life is amazing. Right? It’s easy to forget it, but then you have these moments that remind you how incredible it is that we even fucking exist. The rest of it—all the crap we worry about, the cerebral contortions we go through to try to make meaning of existence—is nothing at all compared to the miracle that we can do this. Just being together with other human beings. Dancing. Alive.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Names are easy to slip on and off, like an ill-fitting suit. I’ve gone through so many. Personal identity, however—that’s a whole different story. Identity is far harder to change.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“We are undone by the specificity of our dreams.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“We are undone by the specificty of our dreams.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“had I simply taken him down off his pedestal to finally see him at the size he had always been?”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“squatting inside someone else’s existence.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Life was a party to which I had not received an invitation but hadn’t missed at all until I was made aware of the event.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“What do you do when you start to realize that you want more than just…existence?”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Did I believe that he was a good man? That’s another question entirely.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“maybe she was just a human being, flawed in the same ways we all are, who simply wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“kind of amazed awe, as potent a feeling as any other form of connection: the shock of knowing that you are desired just as you are, no matter how broken you might feel.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“when you have too much to say and no particular words to articulate any of it.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Overcome by experiencing, all at once, the myriad joys and disappointments of emerging adulthood: love and longing and rejection, emotional connections and risky decisions, the bridges we usually cross bit by bit as we come of age. But for me, emerging as a fully formed adult from my protective cocoon with none of those youthful experiences under my belt, feeling all these things at once was like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. I had no understanding of what lay below me, only that the fall was utterly disorienting and I’d never felt this particular kind of awfulness.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“The more we continue to replace a life of value with the “virtual” life”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Memory is a fickle beast. So often we choose what we want to remember; but sometimes memories choose us. The memories we most want to forget are the ones that fold themselves into our subconscious, waiting until we least expect them to rise up and pinch us tight in their talons. You’ll be walking down the street on an otherwise-normal morning and suddenly there it will be, the thing you most wish you didn’t remember, stealing your breath away, leaving you horror-struck and ashamed.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“there’s one clear lesson that I learned from my hermitic childhood”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Today lives in the shadow of tomorrow. And the shape of that shadow”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise