“I keep wishing you had had a better life...a different life. But a different life would have made you a different Blue." He looked at me then. "And that would be the biggest tragedy of all.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“Someone told me once that to create true art you must be willing to bleed and let others watch.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“Sometimes the things we want to be rescued from can save us.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“You may not be a work of art, but you are definitely a piece of work.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“Why don’t you focus on where you’re going and less on where you came from?”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“But there's no way to avoid regret. Don't let anybody tell you different. Regret is just life's aftertaste. No matter what you choose, you're gonna wonder if you shoulda done things different. I didn't necessarily choose wrong. I just chose. And I lived with my choice, aftertaste and all.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“Once upon a time there was a little blackbird, pushed out of the nest, unwanted.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I was scarred but I was not broken. Beneath my wounds I was still whole. Beneath my insecurities, beneath my pain, beneath my struggle, beneath it all, I was still whole.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“There's a whole lot more to most people than meets the eye, Wilson. Unfortunately, a lot of times it isn't good stuff. It's scary stuff, painful stuff. By now, you know so much scary, painful stuff about me, it's a wonder you're still around. You had me pegged pretty well right from the start, I'd say. You're wrong about one thing, though. Girls like me notice guys like you. We just don't think we deserve them.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I've never felt about anybody the way I feel about you," I confessed in a rush. "I can't imagine that what I'm feeling isn't love. But 'I love you' doesn't feel adequate to express it." I plunged headlong into babbling. "I desperately want you to love me. I need you to love me - but I don't want to need it, and I'm afraid that I need it too much.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“She said 'life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“You are missing a key element to the story. Maybe the moral of the legend is that we are all carved, created, and formed by a master hand. Maybe we are all works of art.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“The beauty of that poem is that everybody can relate, because we all feel like nobody. We all feel like we are on the outside, looking in. We all feel scattered. But I think it's that self-awareness that actually makes us somebody. And you are definitely somebody, Blue. You may not be a work of art, but you are definitely a piece of work.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“Loving someone means putting their needs above your own. No matter what. Somehow, you figured that out. I'll be damned if I know how, but you did.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“So often, I felt like my hands and heart knew something I did not, and I surrendered the art to them.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“What we believe affects our choices, our actions, and subsequently, our lives. The Greeks believed in thier gods, and this belief affected everything else. History is written according to what men believe, whether or not it's true. As the writer of your own history, what you believe influences the paths you take. Do you believe in something that may be a myth? I'm not talking about religious beliefs, per se. I'm talking about things you've told yourself, or things you've been told for so long that you just assume that they are true.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“You can't control who loves you...you can't let someone love you anymore than you can make someone love you”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I can't control what you see or how you interpret what you see any more than I can control what you think of me.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“And in weeping there was power. The power to heal, the power to release pain and let go, the power to endure love and to shoulder loss. And as the weeks became months, I cried less and smiled more. And peace became a more frequent companion.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“If we sacrifice everything for a cause, we tend to become a spokesperson instead of a lover, an organizer instead of a wife, a mouthpiece instead of a mother.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I could eat a unicorn and pick my teeth with his horn! I'm absolutely famished.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I love the way you smile at me... knocks me on my arse.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“There's no sense in running from the past. We can't throw it away or pretend it didn't happen, Miss Echohawk. But maybe we can learn something from it. You have an interesting story, and I'd like you to tell me more.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I don't have terrible taste in women. I'm mad about you, aren't I?”
“Are you?"
“Yes, Blue. I am. I am completely gone on you.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“If we sacrifice everything for a cause, we tend to become a spokesperson instead of a lover, an organizer instead of a wife, a mouthpiece instead of a mother. I gave everything else away in the name of a greater good, but look how many people I hurt. Look at the ripple effects of thinking my life's work was more important than the people in my life.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“Usually redemption implies rescue - being saved. What were you being saved from?' he inquired, his voice carefully neutral. 'Ugliness.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“He had become the most relevant thing in my life. Redemption, resolution, revelation, and now relevance.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
“I know you are incredibly bright, because when you are not being a smartarse your comments in class are very insightful, and when you ARE being a smartarse you are witty and clever and you make me laugh even when I want to slap you.”
― Amy Harmon, quote from A Different Blue
Amy Harmon
Born place: in Neverland, The United States
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“Just another little piece of utterly irrelevant history, aspiring to permanence, doomed to oblivion.”
― Tommy Wallach, quote from We All Looked Up
“I mourned for a life that I'd lost.”
― Cecelia Ahern, quote from The Year I Met You
“The sky was a rich cloudless blue, the air still and dry, the maple trees glowing with glorious reds and oranges and yellows, and everywhere on Gardam Street squirrels bustled about with self-importance, burying their nuts in the most unlikely places.”
― Jeanne Birdsall, quote from The Penderwicks on Gardam Street
“Fresh starts, okay? Maybe you're not ready to take it, but at least know one's here.”
― Karole Cozzo, quote from How to Keep Rolling After a Fall
“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter. Yet we also recognize that the experiencing self should not be ignored. The peak and the ending are not the only things that count. In favoring the moment of intense joy over steady happiness, the remembering self is hardly always wise. “An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds,” Kahneman observes. “We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory … has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.” When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.”
― Atul Gawande, quote from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
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Something Like Winte...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
