Elise > Elise's Quotes

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“She’s the kind of suburban white mother who buys home living magazines at the grocery checkout counter, who drinks crate upon crate of four-dollar wines from Trader Joe’s, who refers to Twilight as “those vampire books,” and who hasn’t read anything other than Costco discount paperbacks for decades.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“But that’s the thing about harbingers: you never know until it’s too late.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“-Abuse at epidemic levels—An astonishing 40 percent of cops acknowledged in one U.S. survey that they were violent with their spouse or children in the previous six months. A second survey had remarkably similar results—40 percent of officers admitted there was violence in their relationship in the previous year. The cops’ abuse rate was up to 15 times that of the public. Younger officers, narcotics cops, those on the night shift and cops who were divorced or separated reported even higher rates of violence at home—up to 66 percent. Eight percent of cops reported “severe” violence—strangulation, beating up their spouse, using a knife or gun.-Discipline is startlingly lax—A U.S. study found that only”
― Alex Roslin, Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence

“Minor thinks he’s right, is the thing, and if you think you’re right, lot of times it gives you breathing room to do whatever the fuck you want in the name of some supposed justice.”
― Keith Rosson, Coffin Moon

“Grief, she told me once when she was talking about Charlie, was forever. An endless, winding river.”
― Jillian Cantor, Beautiful Little Fools

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Certainly we all have our deal-breakers. But when patients repeatedly engage in this kind of analysis, sometimes I’ll say, “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“They want women who don’t make things more complicated than they need to be. It’s sexism, sure, but part of me wonders sometimes if men’s willful ignorance is based in jealousy, too. Like deep down, most of them know that they could never hold all of those calculations in their heads themselves. That they would be crushed under the weight of them.”
― Olivia Muenter, Little One

“am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best. Which is how we live now.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“I felt, in my bones, an acceptance of men behaving badly, a value in not calling them out, in protecting a man’s belief in his own importance, and a premium placed on keeping such things private.”
― Belle Burden, Strangers A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden & The Next Thing by Mira Hollis 2 Books Colletion Set

“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

“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

“What a fairy tale is meant to do," she said, "if it's meant to do anything at all, Tolkien says, is give us new perspective on our world, the consolation of a happy ending. A recovery of sorts. Like we leave that world to see ours anew.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, The Secret Book of Flora Lea

“Faith doesn’t promise miracles and answered prayers; it only promises that they are possible.”
― Theodore Johnson, If We Are Brave: Essays from Black Americana

“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

“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

“There are millions and millions of people with mental problems. They work regular jobs, irregular jobs, they work at home, they don’t work, they’re married or single, they have kids or don’t, they do laundry and fall in love and have opinions and grieve their losses and, if they’re lucky, take their meds.
That’s what I’m learning. I am a person with a mental illness. So it takes some extra effort. So sometimes it’s debilitating. But now that I’m learning to manage it, it’s becoming not my entire life but simply a part of how I live, something the people around me live with as well, something I can accept. I have to. That’s the only way this works.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House