“There’s a difference between losing something you knew you had and losing something you discovered you had. One is a disappointment. The other feels like losing a piece of yourself.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn't even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself. But if you keep waiting for the doors to be opened for you... I think you'll have a hard time finding single happiness, let alone that double portion.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Loving someone is such an inherently dangerous act. And yet, love, that’s where safety lives.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Saba used to say there was a difference between bravery and courage. Bravery was doing something dangerous without thinking. Courage was walking into danger, knowing full well the risks.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Leaving people to jumped conclusions is sometimes simpler than explaining a complicated truth”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“And something tells me if it matters, maybe it shouldn't be easy.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Sometimes the wind blows you places you weren't expecting: sometimes it blows you away from those places, too.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Because I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Accidents. It's all about the accidents.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“I’ve since come to understand that the universe operates on the same general equilibrium theory as markets.It never gives you something without making you pay for it somehow.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Because you don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.”
“If that were true, nobody would ever find their keys.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Can you move on from something when you're not sure what it is you're moving on from?”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“It takes certain kind of naiveté, or perhaps just stupidity, to know things will end and still hope otherwise.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“I'm so tired of missing things I don't have.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“It was just one day and it's been just one year. But maybe one day is enough. Maybe one hour is enough. Maybe time has nothing at all to do with it". Willem”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“By that point, it’ll have been more than year since I met Lulu. Any sane person would say it’s too late. It already felt too late that first day, when I woke up in the hospital.
But even so, I’ve kept looking.
I’m still looking.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn’t even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“I miss my father. I miss my grandfather. I miss my home. And I miss my mother. But the thing is, for almost three years, I managed not to miss any of them. And then I spent that one day with that one girl. One day ... It was like she gave me her whole self, and somehow as a result, I gave her more of myself than I even realized there was to give. But then she was gone. And only after I'd been filled up by her, by that day, did I understand how empty I really was.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“When you make such a large withdrawal of happiness, somewhere you'll have to make an equally large deposit. It all goes back to the universal law of equilibrium.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Nothing happens without intention, Willem. Nothing. This theory of yours - life is rules by accidents - isn't that just one huge excuse for passivity?”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Something given, something taken away. Does it always have to work like that?”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“But it's a big ocean. It's an even bigger world. And maybe we've gotten as close as we're supposed to get.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Somethings you don't know you want until they're gone. Other things you think want, but don't understand you already have them.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Once the options increase, settling on one becomes harder.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“A long flight. Jetlag. Immigration. Customs. And then finally, that first step into a new place, that moment of exhilaration and disorientation, each feeding the other. That moment when anything can happen”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“Days like these go on for years. It's the ones you want to last that slip away - one, two, three - in seconds.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“I don’t discount a magical hand of fate. I am an actor, after all, and a Shakespearian, no less. But it can’t be the ruling force of your life. You have to be the driver.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
“For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love.
But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will.
Maybe for double happiness, you need both.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Year
Gayle Forman
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“I was born to join in love, not hate - that is my nature.”
― Sophocles, quote from Antigone
“Kaladin frowned. “Wait. Are you wearing cologne? In prison?”
“Well, there was no need to be barbaric, just because I was incarcerated.”
“Storms, you’re spoiled,” Kaladin said, smiling.
“I’m refined, you insolent farmer,” Adolin said. Then he grinned. “Besides, I’ll have you know that I had to use cold water for my baths while here.”
“Poor boy.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Words of Radiance
“It was one of the many rules in the kennel, rules that didn't always make sense, or even seem important, until some situation drew the lesson out.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.
Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.
I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.
I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same?
Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“She bit delicately down on a breadstick, holding it between her teeth..
"Mind if I have a Bite"
Shock snapped her eyes wide open and froze her breath..dark eyes dominating her field of vision, a whiff of some kind of calogne in her nostrils, two long fingers tilting her chin up. Damon leaned in, and neatly and precisely, bit off the other end of the bread stick.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle
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