Hilary > Hilary's Quotes

“For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me. ”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.

Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement. But”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“I must let go now. Let you go. Love is too often The answer for staying. Too seldom the reason For going. I drop the line And watch you drift away. “All along You thought The fiery current Of your lover’s breast Pulled you to the deep. But it was my heart-tide Releasing you To float adrift With seaweed.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Each time I fall in love I feel fear that the world won't let me be in the world with it, that I either have to pick the world or the love.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith. I will give you every single treat.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I'd rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Well, I am so sensitive and I am very fragile but so is everything else, and living with a dangerous amount of sensitivity is sort of what I have to do sometimes, and it is so very much better than living with no gusto at all. And I’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I was born on the boundary line between cold and hot, at the intersection of the two elements that make a clap of thunder.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice). Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces. Reassemble. This is the essential movement of my holy flux.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“What if I got a crown for doing nothing but being who I am,”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I am tired of sinking down to a lower place to be with men. I am tired of throwing a tarp over some of my personality so that the shape of my identity suits some gross man a little better for whatever shitty things he needs to do in order to keep his boring identity erect and supreme.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I am that mysterious stranger that I hoped to meet. I met her at a dark dance. We came here to live together until I could stay by myself. The place is here. The time is now. This is all my lifetime.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“As I was watching, I thought about how unfair it was that she and I had to think about having kids - that we had to sit here talking about it, feeling like if we didn't have children, we would always regret it. It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties - when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience - from doing anything useful with them at all. It is hard to when such a large portion of your mind, at any given time, is preoccupied with the possibility - a question that didn't seem to preoccupy the drunken men at all.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendship, art. I would not have invented child-rearing.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“I like the jellyfish because it has no brain or heart. It’s just a thing that takes in the ocean through its mouth. I like that kind of ambition and simplicity.”
― Sheila Heti, Women in Clothes

“There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children. There is something at-loose-ends feeling about such a woman. What is she going to do instead? What sort of trouble will she make?”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds