The Holiday Trap Quotes

“You don't hurt people by choosing yourself over them. They hurt themselves with what they think about it. It's not your job to fold yourself up so small that your edges never bump into anyone else. What kind of life is that?”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“You can't know this yet. In fact, we rarely know it until it's too late to need to know it, but you are going to be just fine.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“You don't hurt people by choosing yourself over them. They hurt themselves with what they think about it. It's not your job to fold yourself up so small that your edges never bump into anyone else.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“How do you know if you'd be better off without your family?" she asked. [...]
"I don't think it's so cut and dry. Like, I still talk to my parents. They love me. They just have lives that aren't the one I want." [...]
"Yeah, it's about choosing how you want the people in your life to make you feel. You can decide you only want people in your life who make you feel respected, cared for, listened to. Then you communicate that to them, and if they repeatedly make you feel disrespected, neglected, or ignored instead, you stop giving them your time or energy."
"Family's hard because it's rarely all bad. There's all those pretty memories of good times too. [...]"
"And it feels like if you cut those people off from your future, then you lose the folks that knew that part of your past. But it's not true. You keep those memories no matter what because they're yours. They don't belong to the people you shared them with.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“It’s not your job to fold yourself up so small that your edges never bump into anyone else, babe. What kind of life is that?”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“Do you ever think maybe it isn’t something that’s out there but just something we choose to do? Like…that there’s this…I dunno, this well of power and control that we can tap into inside ourselves. But then the world gets in the way. The world, circumstances, other people, like, squeeze it out of us. Make it smaller and smaller until it’s gone.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“You've sanded off the corners of your desire until its a damn circle.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“What use is getting what you wanted if you get it at the cost of never being real about your feelings?”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“Honesty on its own is just kind of telling the truth about concrete things. But emotions are things you need to be honest about too and some people can tell the technical truth about what happened or what they said without honoring their feelings.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“Assumptions break down under questioning because they're not made of substance but of assumptions”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“Failing is proof to yourself that you tried something. That you did something instead of just sitting on your ass letting life pass you by.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“Greta thought of all the times she'd hoped for opportunities to be presented to her. She'd worked hard to always seem responsible and dedicated. She'd watched as other people were chosen for opportunities she would love to have and always figured it was because there more qualified or more appealing than her.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“You can decide you only want people in your life who make you feel respected, cared for, listened to. Then you communicate that to them, and if they repeatedly make you feel disrespected, neglected, or ignored instead, you stop giving them your time and energy.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“Family's hard because it's rarely all bad. There's all those pretty memories of good times too.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“We all judge our parents, Greta. They're the people who teach us what the world is and when we're old enough, we learn that they're wrong in ways they didn't even know. That's because the world is different for us.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Plan.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“We all judge our parents, Greta. They’re the people who teach us what the world is, and when we’re old enough, we learn that they’re wrong in ways they didn’t even know. That’s because the world is different for us.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“It's like dessert stomach. Narcissistic mom heart. There's always room.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap

“You just have to realize that romance is a cultural concept constructed from outdated and fictionalized notions of subjugating one's autonomy to the notion of partnership. Then every time you find yourself having these yearnings for shit and you don't know why, ask yourself 'do I want this because movies and pop culture have trained me to believe I'm only loved when someone else gives this thing to me?' and soon you'll see that you can tease apart your actual individual desires from the mess of capital 'R' Romance that society spoon feeds us.”
― Roan Parrish, The Holiday Trap