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

“The people who hate Obamacare don’t hate it because they believe that it’s funded by forced purchases rather than forced taxes; what they hate is the forcing. Obamacare might not be socialism, but it’s certainly more collectivist than some people care for, restricting individual freedom in the name of the greater good. •”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them


“Research shows that people who think they have the most willpower are actually the most likely to lose control when tempted.1 For example, smokers who are the most optimistic about their ability to resist temptation are the most likely to relapse four months later, and overoptimistic dieters are the least likely to lose weight. Why? They fail to predict when, where, and why they will give in. They expose themselves to more temptation,”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It


“As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept.
Child abuse will always re-emerge, no matter how many years go by. We read of cases of people who have come forward after thirty or forty years to say they were abused as children in care homes by wardens, schoolteachers, neighbours, fathers, priests. The Catholic Church in the United States in the last decade has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for 'acts of sodomy and depravity towards children', to quote one information-exchange web-site. Why do these ageing people make the abuse public so late in their lives? To seek attention? No, it's because deep down there is a wound they need to bring out into the clean air before it can heal.
Many clinicians miss signs of abuse in children because they, as decent people, do not want to find evidence of what Dr Ross suggests is 'a sick society that has grown sicker, and the abuse of children more bizarre'.
(Note: this was written in the UK many years before the revelations of Jimmy Savile's widespread abuse, which included some ritual abuse)”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind


“Pleasure has turned into habit much more quickly than I should have ever thought possible.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin


“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz


Interesting books

Last Hit
(10.7K)
Last Hit
by Jessica Clare
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
(3.6K)
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society
(1.5K)
The Age of Empathy:...
by Frans de Waal
All the Stars in the Sky
(2.1K)
All the Stars in the...
by Sarah Lyons Fleming
Autobiography of a Geisha
(2.6K)
The Obelisk Gate
(26.8K)
The Obelisk Gate
by N.K. Jemisin

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.