Marian Keyes · 528 pages
Rating: (36.3K votes)
“why can't we love the right people? what is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? we are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“What doesn't kill us makes us funnier.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“You will go on and meet someone else and I'll just be a chapter in your tale, but for me, you were, you are and you always will be, the whole story.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“How to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“Why do we have such a finite capacity for pleasure but an infinite one for pain?”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“Relationship gurus always said that an attraction based on friendship and mutual respect was far more likely to stay the course - and the bastards were right.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“When God closes one door, He slams another in your face”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“Her world had shrunk - no matter who she was with, she'd prefer to be with him. That's what happened when you fell in love - you only want to see them.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“What is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? Why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? We are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs and if human beings were cars, we would return them for being faulty.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“Anton and I went to see her in her office in Soho. It was less than a fortnight before I gave birth to Ema so getting me there was a huge undertaking, like crating and transporting a sick elephant.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“As always she was kitted out in the pristine pastels of baby clothes and her little plimsolls were so white my eyes ached. To look directly at them one would need a piece of cardboard with a hole in it, of the type used for viewing a solar eclipse.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“At all times a heavy ceramic casserole would sit on a pale blue Aga, so should people drop in unexpectedly, I could wander out in my bare feet, welcome them warmly, give them dinner, then press my home-made elderberry wine on them. I would be like Nigella Lawson.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“She had once tried to copy Jojo’s sexy wink – drink had been taken – but she had simply succeeded in dislodging her contact lens which had made her eyelid flutter like a trapped butterfly.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from The Other Side of the Story
“I believe in Free Will, the Force Almighty by which we conduct ourselves as if we were the sons and daughters of a just and wise God, even if there is no such Supreme Being. And by free will, we can choose to do good on this earth, no matter that we all die, and do not know where we go when we die, or if a justice or explanation awaits us.
I believe that we can, through our reason, know what good is, and in the communion of men and women, in which the forgiveness of wrongs will always be more significant than the avenging of them, and that in the beautiful natural world that surrounds us, we represent the best and the finest of beings, for we alone can see that natural beauty, appreciate it, learn from it, weep for it, and seek to conserve it and protect it.
I believe finally that we are the only true moral force in the physical world, the makers of, ethics and moral ideas, and that we must be as good as the gods we created in the past to guide us.
I believe that through our finest efforts, we will succeed finally in creating heaven on earth, and we do it every time that we love, every time that we embrace, every time that we commit to create rather than destroy, every time that we place life over death, and the natural over what is unnatural, insofar as we are able to define it.
And I suppose I do believe in the final analysis that a peace of mind can be obtained in the face of the worst horrors and the worst losses. It can be obtained by faith in change and in will and in accident and by faith in ourselves, that we will do the right thing, more often than not, in the face of adversity.
For ours is the power and the glory, because we are capable of visions and ideas which are ultimately stronger and more enduring than we are.
That is my credo. That is my belief, for what it's worth, and it sustains me. And if I were to die right now, I wouldn't be afraid. Because I can't believe that horror or chaos awaits us.
If any revelation awaits us at all, it must be as good as our ideals and our philosophy. For surely nature must embrace the visible and the invisible, and it couldn't fall short of us. The thing that makes the flowers open and the snowflakes fall must contain a wisdom and a final secret as intricate and beautiful as the blooming camellia or the clouds gathering above, so white and so pure in the blackness.
If that isn't so, then we are in the grip of a staggering irony. And all the spooks of hell might as well dance. There could be a devil. People who burn other people to death are fine. There could be anything.
But the world is simply to beautiful for that.
At least it seems that way to me.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Witching Hour
“Oh, Eva." He rubbed his cheek against my damp face. "I must've wished for you so hard and so often you had no choice but to come true.”
― Sylvia Day, quote from Bared to You
“From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, quote from Of Human Bondage
“Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value.”
― Plato, quote from The Republic
“He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time; but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him, seemed to thrill him through and through,—to melt away every resolution, all power of self-control, as if it were wax before a fire.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, quote from North and South
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