“When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“And I felt closer to you. Because you knew me so much better than I'd realized - and still loved me.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“...grief is loved turned into an eternal missing. ...It can't be contained in hours or days or minutes.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“Sex and laughter. The heart and lungs of a relationship.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“I threw everything we had together - the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood - into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss that I thought I could no longer be there.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“I don't believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit, unwittingly drawing them closer until they extinguish the very flame they were drawn to.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“I reminded you I studied literature, didn't I? I've had an endless supply of quotations at my disposal, but they had always highlighted the inadequacy of my life rather than providing an uplifting literary score to it.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“An explosion in space makes no sound at all.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“Grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels....”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“My job isn't to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in ourselves and others every day should be a challenge that we want to achieve.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“Grief is love turned into an eternal missing.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
“But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.”
― Rosamund Lupton, quote from Sister
Rosamund Lupton
Born place: in Cambridge, The United Kingdom
Born date July 22, 2018
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“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you?
And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.
And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water.
But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.
Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing.
And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“Scarecrows weren't meant to scare the crows, they were meant to scare the corn. It was enough to give a person nightmares. Otherwise, why would so many horror movies have cornfields in them?”
― Laura Ruby, quote from Bone Gap
“Looking at her, he could almost see the painted serpent squirming on her skin, ready to turn, mouth open.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The Fever
“Actually,” Jayden said, “Not completely unlike the Cloak of Invisibility, although different in that those individuals using these devices wouldn’t become completely invisible. Exactly.” “So nothing like it,” Matthias said. “Moron status secured.”
― A.E. Kirk, quote from Demons in Disguise
“Alle mennesker heter egentlig noe annet.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
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The Hero of Ages
Running with Scissor...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.
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