Quotes from Give It Back

Danielle Esplin ·  302 pages

Rating: (0.9K votes)


“Have you ever loved someone so much that even when they chip pieces away from you, you still try to give them what’s left? I know I have… I know I do.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“There’s an undeniable thrill about meeting a stranger and spending a few hours together, indulging in each other’s lives. It’s that spurt of saying whatever you want and leaving it behind with someone who’ll never look at you and think of it again.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“The void inside me starts to fill, but my heart has holes, and whatever it holds will run out, leaving me empty once again.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“A familiar sensation sparks inside me, the one I had a few years ago, the one that hurts because it’s dangerous and overwhelming. Knowing how it is to truly love someone is torturous. You try to bury that feeling. So you become lonely, deprived, and when you sense anything remotely like it, the emotion comes back to haunt you. It’s one sick fucking game.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“Many nights I watch the sun set. Many nights I watch the moon. They fascinate me. They’re the only things I get to share with everyone: the stars, the moon, the universe.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back



“Ever since her diagnosis, she’s been fading like a light bulb with cancer’s hand on the rotary dimmer.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“I hate reading poems—school made me hate them. I’d spend hours interpreting one, just to read the memorandum and realize I’d be fucked during exams. I remember making a little asterisk next to every question I struggled with, and at the end of the paper, I’d realize I was looking at the fucking Milky Way.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“It’s like I’m on a roller-coaster ride, but I’m not allowed to get off. I’m strapped to the seat, and within eyesight the unfinished twirl of the track swirls into the air.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“I guess we’re all guilty at some point of failing to appreciate the small things, because when we use a broad brush to paint our exemplary lives, we splatter ourselves with ignorance.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“Father", that sounds too dominant, too stern or Mufasa-like – he’s a coward, a low-budget, hand-fucking coward.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back



“Oh, I just wasted two hundred dollars on a gym membership, which I didn’t use…even once. My shorts are getting shorter. Lately I’ve been looking like a slut—unintentionally of course.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“It’s as if everyone got cancer the day I was diagnosed, except I’m their tumor.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“The ocean fascinates me too. How it connects everything and everyone, but at the same time it divides us. It’s a mystery, full of life and possibilities. It’s just…phenomenal.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“Since her diagnoses she has been fading like a light bulb with cancer’s hand on the rotary dimmer.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“It’s all about that cosy, homey feeling, the one you leave behind when you travel across the world.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back



“As I rise from my seat, my notes almost fly to the floor. I quickly clutch them to my body before I awkwardly enter the interview room in a fucked-up-question-mark posture, walking as though I’m ten shits behind.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“He might not be here, but the day he misses an opportunity to party is the day Jocelyn Wildenstein is considered the paragon of beauty.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


“I can hear the tick tick tick in my head: A tripwire ready to explode in fury. And then, in my mind, I start to count down from ten…any moment now.”
― Danielle Esplin, quote from Give It Back


About the author

Danielle Esplin
Born place: in Cape Town, South Africa
Born date March 22, 2018
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“I made a terrible mistake marryin’ Piper. It was you I said my vows to on my weddin’ day—your face was in my mind. And that night ’twas you I—” “Nay!” She covered his mouth with her hand, unable to hear it, but he only held her tighter. She cried until the front of his linen shirt was damp with her tears, and when she pushed away from him he would not let her go. “There’s never been another like you,” he whispered. “And never will there be.”
― Laura Frantz, quote from The Frontiersman's Daughter


“Love is a handful of seeds, marriage the garden, and like your gardens, Paula, marriage requires total commitment, hard work, and a great deal of love and care. Be ruthless with the weeds. Pull them out before they take hold. Bring the same dedication to your marriage that you do to your gardens and everything will be all right. Remember that a marriage has to be constantly replenished too, if you want it to flourish...”
― Barbara Taylor Bradford, quote from Hold the Dream


“Nicholas showed her the way. “He would sometimes laugh at the idea of being what he called ‘an Ex,’ ” said Lili Dehn. Alexandra picked up the expression. “Don’t call me an Empress any more—I’m only an Ex,” she would say. One day at lunch when an especially unpalatable ham appeared on the table, Nicholas made everyone laugh by shrugging and saying, “Well, this may have once been a ham, but now it’s nothing but an ex-ham.”
― Robert K. Massie, quote from Nicholas and Alexandra


“Slowly what she composed with the new day was her own focus, to bring together body and mind. This was made with an effort, as if all the dissolutions and dispersions of her self the night before were difficult to reassemble. She was like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day.

The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blond eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry. Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture, to efface the uneven swellings caused by sleep, but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares, to reform the contours and blurred surfaces of the cheeks, to erase the contradictions and conflicts which strained the clarity of the face’s lines, disturbing the purity of its forms.

She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile.

Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully ploughed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair, and costume, for a fissure through which to explode.

What she saw in the mirror now was a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful. The multiple acts of composure and artifice had merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty emerged which had been frayed and marred by anxiety.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from A Spy in the House of Love


“Once I had a “self”; now I am no more than an object.”
― Emil M. Cioran, quote from A Short History of Decay


Interesting books

Last Song Before Night
(850)
Last Song Before Nig...
by Ilana C. Myer
City of Blades
(6.9K)
City of Blades
by Robert Jackson Bennett
The Spider's War
(3.9K)
The Spider's War
by Daniel Abraham
The Price of Valour
(5.2K)
The Price of Valour
by Django Wexler
The Dinosaur Lords
(1.7K)
The Dinosaur Lords
by Victor Milán
Where Angels Fear to Tread
(10.6K)
Where Angels Fear to...
by E.M. Forster

About BookQuoters

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.