Watch Me Disappear Quotes

“Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life. To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“They’ll cry when you leave and buy you a Costco cake with your name on it and then forget about you ten minutes later when they replace you with someone younger and fresher and cheaper.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Why do adults think that every problem can be fixed by sending you to talk to a more qualified adult. ... It's like a game of Hot Potato: Whenever you have an idea or emotion that doesn't fit comfortably into the box that the world has built for you, everyone goes into a frenzy trying to find an expert who can convince you to climb back inside.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Think about what a miracle it is that we’re all working in concert with one another. Every day humans get a fresh chance to decide whether we’re going to destroy each other or build a better world, and you know what? For the most part, we do the latter.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Take two people with a mutual willingness to connect, convince them to expose their innermost thoughts, and presto: true love.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else's extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind. Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“So I quietly held her in my arms, wondering how she'd managed to spin magic out of that mess, to be such a terrific parent when she'd had such bad ones. Perhaps we're not doomed to echo our parents after all: perhaps, we truly had the ability to write our own life stories, to change the endings if we wanted to.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“It’s as if her mom is always just offstage, about to enter, but keeps missing her cue.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“As the quantum physicist Max Planck once wrote, “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Alarmed, Olive wants to shout: Don’t they know that if they touch the butterflies’ wings, they’ll die? Did no one teach them to Leave No Trace? She looks around at the overflowing trash cans, the parents wielding aerosol sunscreens, and worries that this is why there aren’t more butterflies here today. Or is it global warming, pesticides? So many potential reasons why the monarch population is declining precipitously; she should really get her mother to plant milkweed in the garden.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“After Billie died, I spent a long time idealizing her. That’s what you do when someone’s gone. You remember only the best parts of them. You reassemble your memories to forget all their flaws, all the fights you had, the things about them that you really kind of hated. It makes your grief feel more powerful to forget how human they were and how human you were with them. Maybe it even assuages your guilt to forget all the dysfunctional parts of your relationship and all the pointless, petty grievances you held against them.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Do you like things the way they are? Because if you do, by all means, carry on. But if you don’t, nothing’s going to change until you decide to make it change.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Find your own thing. Don’t just do what everyone expects you to do. Remember: You have the right to become whoever you want to be. Don’t worry about what other people might think…because you will be exceptional, Olive. But you have to be willing to try.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Find your own thing. Don’t just do what everyone expects you to do. Remember: You have the right to become whoever you want to be. Don’t worry about what other people might think…because you will be exceptional, Olive. But”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“You grow predictable, your quirks no longer interesting but expected. Like a board game that you've played too many times to truly enjoy, a favorite movie that you don't feel compelled to watch all the way though anymore. You're comforted by your spouse's presence; yes, you still love them; but you are no longer thrilled by them, not in the way you once were. You are no longer surprised.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“—” he”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“Love wasn’t supposed to be simple; it was supposed to be something you did regardless: I love you anyway.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“program,”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“In life the world is tough on soft things. She’s going to need to grow a thicker skin or she’s going to spend her whole life being too afraid to try anything”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“That grief isn’t something you can walk away from after a finite amount of time, but is something that washes you along, tumbling you in and out with the tides?)”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“I believed that divorce was for cowards who used their partner’s failings as an excuse to avoid looking too closely in the mirror.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear

“You were not the typical kid,” Jonathan says. Billie laughs at this and tips her head backward over Jonathan’s knees to smile at him. There’s sand speckling her cheekbones, stuck in the delicate lines around her eyes, and he gently wipes it away. “Anyway, Olive is tougher than you’re giving her credit for.”
― Janelle Brown, Watch Me Disappear