Laney Woodcock > Laney's Quotes

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.”
― Lena Dunham

“When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
― Joan Didion

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
― Joan Didion

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“Mad Matter: "Have I gone mad?"
Alice: "I'm afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”
― Tim Burton, Alice in Wonderland: Based on the Motion Picture Directed by Tim Burton

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“There are no days more full than those we go back to.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli