Quotes from Secrets to Happiness

Sarah Dunn ·  288 pages

Rating: (2.1K votes)


“Ordinarily, I am the person who falls in love quickly and somewhat inappropriately and then goes on to destroy what is a good thing. That's always been my style. So, you know: I get it. And I feel right now the way I imagine all those guys felt with me. And I have to say, for the first time in my life, I feel something approaching compassion for them.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“You've got to let people be just, you know, people. Everyone does bad things sometimes, for all sorts of reasons. You've got to at least understand.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“Betsy hadn't had sex, actual; sex-sex, full sex, in two hundred and fifty-three days. She decided on her thirty-seventh birthday that she wouldn't sleep with anyone unless it was in the context of a committed relationship which had some sort of future, and she was only gradually coming to the realization of what happens when a woman her age makes a decision like that: she never has sex again.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“I don't want to go back into that dressing room and take off my boots and my pants and start putting on jeans only to discover that the ones you brought me are all too tight, and then when I ask for the next size up, be informed that they're the biggest size you carry. I can't take that today. Seriously, I'll blow my head off. So look at me, look at my ass, look at my gut, take it all in, and then tell me honestly if you anticipate we're going to have a problem.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness



“There was a guy roasting chestnuts on the street corner, and the smell wafted over, hinting at the coming Winter, but in a good way, in the way that makes you think about Christmas and snow days and fires crackling away in fireplaces.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“It was like the time her sister suggested she read Emily Dickinson to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Once certain thoughts got into your head, you couldn't get rid of them. ”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“It was awful, but it's over. And now I feel like I'm finally coming up for air."
"Yes, well, it's been a very stressful time for both of us," said Leonard.
"How has it been stressful for you? said Holly.
"I had that move."
Holly just looked at him.
"What," said Leonard.
"You moved apartments" said Holly.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“More and more often these days days, though, Holly found herself thinking that perhaps what God wanted was not to be feared or obeyed or even to be worshiped -
but maybe God just wanted to be wondered about.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“It's interesting said Jack.
"What is?"
"You believe in God." he said. You just don't believe that God is good.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness



“Sometimes Holly could start to see the order in things, she got a glimmer of a pattern. And that thing everyone seems to say these days, about how things always happen for a reason- Holly was getting close to being willing to concede that that was maybe, possibly true.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“Punish you for what?" said Jack.
"Everything! Nothing. I don't know. That's the problem," said Holly. "That's what happens when you grow up the way I did. You spend the rest of your life just waiting for God to smite the shit out of you.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“Somebody out of touch with reality, when she jumped she probably thought she’d fly.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


“(Everybody else seemed to be having a good time. She tried to remember what her therapist told her to do in situations like this.) Don't compare your insides to other people's outsides.”
― Sarah Dunn, quote from Secrets to Happiness


About the author

Sarah Dunn
Born place: Phoenix, Arizona, The United States
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Popular quotes

“Things... well, things suck sometimes. And sometimes you can fix it. And sometimes you can't. It's just the way it is.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from Stealing Heaven


“jacket, linked the fingers of his hands together behind his neck, and, as he noticed the feeble ticking of his watch, suddenly realized that he had been escaping all his life, that life had been a constant escape, escape from meaninglessness into music, from music to guilt, from guilt and self-punishment into pure ratiocination, and finally escape from that too, that it was retreat after retreat, as if his guardian angel had, in his own peculiar fashion, been steering him to the antithesis of retreat, to an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were, at which point he understood that there was nothing to be understood, that if there was reason in the world it far transcended his own, and that therefore it was enough to notice and observe that which he actually possessed. And he really had ‘retreated into an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were’,”
― László Krasznahorkai, quote from The Melancholy of Resistance


“He was ridiculously handsome, tall, lean yet solid with muscle. Politely immoral, indifferent to censure. As if he knew he was irresistible in all manner of things. Not just to her, but to everyone, to women particularly.”
― C.C. Gibbs, quote from All He Desires


“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders


“Everything good about me, I learned from you,” I whisper. “You’re giving me too much credit. We got it from our parents.” Metias chuckles a little. It’s a sad sound. There’s another long, ten-second pause before he goes on. “You’ll find your tribe,” he says. “We all do. Someday, someone out there will see you for the girl you really are. Someday, you’ll find someone who understands you.”
― Marie Lu, quote from Life Before Legend: Stories of the Criminal and the Prodigy


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