“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
“You told me there wouldn’t be any Rod Serling voice-overs, yet here I am in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode. Oh, and let me guess the title of it, Night of the Terminally Stupid! (Channon)”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Dragonswan
“Не се страхувай да бъдеш наранена. По-добре е отколкото никога да не изпиташ нещо, което да те разтресе из основи. Дори временната радост е по-добре от нищо. Страх те е да не те наранят, както мен ме е страх да умра. Това не означава, че няма да изживея пълноценно всеки ден.”
― Vi Keeland, quote from Stuck-Up Suit
“Sweet little thing says she still wants to marry him. Breaks your heart: She sighed and sounded sincere, so Tracy nodded in a way she hoped denoted that she, too, was a little bit heartbroken — even though she thought that if her (hypothetical) boyfriend were in a coma for more than a few weeks, she’d probably just cut her losses and move on, not stick around to watch him shit in his pants for the next fifty years.”
― Belinda Bauer, quote from Rubbernecker
“The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.
True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:
You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.
(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received 'tenners,' the longest term then given.
(In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the 'nuns.' Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three-year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II
“Emmeline Adel.
...
"Ivy, you need to look at this."
...
Our mother? At Rookwood?”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Whispers in the Walls
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