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
“Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Thud!
“I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.”
― Richard Wright, quote from Black Boy
“Not being liked was so much worse than being invisible.”
― Rebecca Donovan, quote from Reason to Breathe
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Mere Christianity
“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”
― Stephen King, quote from Christine
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