“Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“And then one day you will look for you in the mirror and you’ll no longer be able to identify yourself—you’ll only see everyone else. You’ll know that you did what they wanted you to do. You will have assimilated. And you will hate yourself for it, because it will be too late.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“People enter our lives for a season, a reason, or a lifetime.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“There are a lot of lonely kids in this world, but the problem is they don’t know about each other.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“There are no such things as fictional characters.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“Sometimes you just have to pick a direction and make mistakes. Then you use what you learn from your failure to pick new, better directions so you can make more mistakes and keep learning.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“And so maybe it isn't the motivating factors that matter so much as simply participating - thrusting your best true, authentic self into the universe with wild abandon. Maybe yielding to our true nature propels us forward into the great unknown, toward targets that we haven't even dreamed up yet but exist nonetheless.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“We live in our heads... which can be very scary places. We forget that we are not just and I, but a she and a you, too. We forget to see ourselves as others see us. For some people, the problem is narcissism - meaning they are selfish, too self-absorbed. But I think that your problem is that you are too selfless. You care about the needs of others more than you care about your own needs. You are strong for them even when it's a detriment to your own well-being.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“There are seven billion people in the world and you have only experienced twenty thousand at the most. And those twenty thousand were fairly homogenous. Your experiences with people have been largely dictated by your parents' choices. The neighborhood in which they chose to purchase a house. Where they sent you to school. And maybe those choices weren't the best for you. Maybe you don't fit in where you are now... There are seven billion other people out there. Seven billion. Are you really pessimistic enough to believe that you wouldn't get along with any of them?”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn't want to become them, but we had no other role models--or "maps," Alex kept saying. "My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn't ever lead me anywhere." And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn't want to go-- and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. If almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“I mean - when was the last time someone asked if you were happy and then looked you in the eyes in a way that made you feel as though they actually gave a shit about your response?”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“You must sometimes pay a high price for individuality, especially if you are a woman.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“I loved him like I loved walking through summer grass barefoot, like I loved a warm mug in my palms, like I loved driving on a long road as the sun sets in the distance. It was a good, safe, simple sort of friendship—well, at first, anyway.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“A life lived well gets messy,”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“I'm waiting for the stars to pop through the black above, waiting for the future to wash over me like so many salty waves - some as turbulent as my thoughts and some as velvety as a good kiss.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that the adults in my life didn't know any more than I did - and then in a flash I knew that everything that had preceded that exact moment was a sort of game played by the so-called adults who winked at each other when you weren't looking...people who pretended to be things they were not, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, athletic coaches, teachers, our heroes, too. But the sad truth was they they were no better than we were, and more often than not, they were much worse because they had been here on this planet longer than we had and therefore were able to collect more vices, worries, and sadness.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“Maybe the goal in America is to have an easy life, and so we find it too disgraceful to tell the truth. I meet a lot of people in my line of work, and I can say with utmost certainty--life is pretty hard for almost all of them.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“There are no guarantees when it comes to such treacherous things as friendship. It’s a tricky business.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“Maybe you held back for too long and then you had to explode. Maybe there was no middle ground left. Sometimes we need to get violent with our words because no one is listening otherwise.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“Don't you ever feel like you want to quit doing something everyone else makes you feel like you're supposed to keep doing? Didn't you ever just simply want to...stop?”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“There is a price to pay for pushing beyond everyone else’s answers, and what I’m finding out is that I’m more than willing to pay it.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“When I look at my father, I can see that he doesn't get it, either, and right then and there, I realize that there's a big part of me that my parents will never get no matter how many therapy sessions we attend - even if we have a million and one conversations about who I am.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“It didn’t seem like everyone could or should be honest at the same time—like maybe the structure of the world wasn’t built to handle such mass amounts of truth.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“You don't have to have it all figured out now or ever. We're all just bumbling through, really. But you'll find something to be passionate about. You just need to leave high school and your town behind.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“So I wore the lesbian comments like a mask that kept everything I really loved private and safe and beyond the dirty grasp of the people who didn't know the real, true me and never would.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“How did high schools all over the country decide that athletes needed pep rallies to boost their pride and self-esteem? Isn't it enough that people actually pay money to see these kids compete in games? That people cheer from the sidelines? And they get their names in the paper? Why don't they take all the lonely ghost floaters in every high school and have a pep rally for them? Make all the most popular kids in school sit on the hard bleachers and cheer until their asses hurt like hell?”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“It's okay to love people who aren't perfect. People who still have work to do on themselves.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
Matthew Quick
Born place: Philadelphia, The United States
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“When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream.
A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy.
I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems... But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night..You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me... You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
“original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)
“I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories
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