Writers & Lovers Quotes

“I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher's prophecy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“You don't realize how much effort you've put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way. A lot of studies say that despite all our fears in this country - death, war, guns, illness - our biggest fear is public speaking. What I am doing right now. And when people are asked to identify which kind of public speaking they are most afraid of, they check the improvisation box. So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight-point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It's improv. Which is funny, because aren't we just improvising all day long? Isn't our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It's strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for. But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can't tell her. That's the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can't tell her that I'm okay.

The geese don't care that I'm crying again. They're used to it.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’ And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It's always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed,' Fabiana says. 'It always is.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It´s so much easier to cry when there are arms around you.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That’s what I’d want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can’t tell her. That’s the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can’t tell her that I’m okay.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I've forgotten what gets revealed right after you break up with someone.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It's a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk about W-4s and the study hall schedule and my mailbox combination and faculty parking. For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It was so awful and weird. I could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn't love them anymore.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers