Hard to Love Quotes

“I like to lean. Too much of the time I have to hold myself up, so if an opportunity to swoon presents itself, I take it.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“The first and best hoarding novelist was Dickens, who crammed his big books with all the details they could hold, and created an unparalleled hoarder portrait in Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, who keeps every object as it was at the hour she was jilted.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“For octopi, ink is a defense mechanism, a means of escape. It is for me as well. Octopi surround themselves with clouds of ink in order to disappear before the clouds dissipate. Sometimes they also create hovering blots of ink that mimic their own shape, so predators will attack the ink and not them. Every time I write about my family, I instinctively obscure the truth with a cloud of self-protection, and invent versions of my life that give me a chance to evade the attacks I dread. The only way I know to get past the sense of threat is to go ahead and release the ink and then slowly wait for the cloud to clear. That might be revision. It might mean time. It might mean a lifetime of time.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“Making something warm and sweet allows her to be warm and sweet in a world that so often isn’t.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“Emerson believes in self-made men, but I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others’ love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“Independence, to me, is nothing but a dangerous delusion.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“But leaning on friends is never going anywhere, it is not proof of anything, and there are no mandatory standards for it to meet or fail to meet. You just find yourself together, side by side, and then one day you are depending on each other, bearing one another’s burdens, basking in each other’s warmth, for decades or only for a moment.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“My shame came not from the consciousness of my utter dependence but in my perverse attraction to a man who represented every clichéd, obvious all-American thing I didn’t want to want: unshakable entitlement, supreme self-satisfaction, and the seemingly effortless ability to wake up cheerful every day and be confident and productive and tall and Southern Californian and win prizes and eat vegetables and go to the gym like clockwork.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“What could be more disturbing, after all, than the possibility that unremarkable, unenviable, uninviting women might have searing stories burning inside them? Maybe only the possibility that a woman might not need to try to please us; that she might not ever choose to look up from her page.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions

“And you will inevitably speak. You will always have your say. You are arranged this way, after all, because you are brother and sister, tumbled together since childhood like agates in a rock polisher, generating your own conversational grit ever since you first had enough shared language to talk.”
― Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions