Quotes from The Perfectionists

Sara Shepard ·  336 pages

Rating: (7.4K votes)


“With perfection comes pressure. Students here are some of the best in the country, and sometimes, they have to let off a little steam. What five girls don’t know, though, is that steam can scald just as badly as an open flame.”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


“This doesn't mean you're damaged. It just means your mind has adapted to feelings of being unsafe. It's a coping mechanism”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


“all of us are damaged in our own ways. It's just that most people call it 'experience'. And you've had a lot of experience.”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


“The first step of any therapy is a little self-awareness. I want you to think about the ways your habits, your belief systems, your personality quirks have been developed to help you and protect you. Then ask yourself if they are truly working or if they’re hurting you. For instance, when you feel a headache coming on, focus on something in front of you. Something real, like your hand, to keep you in the moment. It sounds small, but it helps, I promise.”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


“She wanted more than anything to believe him. To believe that things didn’t always have to be so desperate, so painful. To believe she didn’t always have to be alone. To believe that maybe, just maybe, one day, everything would be okay.”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists



“Don’t you think it’s a good idea to . . . I don’t know. To slow down sometimes? To look around and see what you want out of life?”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


“Memory was a tricky thing, but reality was even trickier. Once you made up your mind about something, it was hard to comprehend that the truth could be something else”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


“I know what I know,” she said softly. “But I let go of the fury I had for that boy a long time ago. If I didn’t, it would consume me. Like perhaps it’s consuming you”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


“Under the glitzy, glamorous surface of the simplest popcorn flick, there were often hidden depths of meaning.”
― Sara Shepard, quote from The Perfectionists


About the author

Sara Shepard
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Popular quotes

“If you recognize, however, that the physical may be partly responsible for your spiritual condition and make allowances for that, you will be better able to deal with the spiritual. Another frequent cause of spiritual depression is what we may describe as a reaction—a reaction after a great blessing, a reaction after some unusual and exceptional experience. I hope to call attention sometime to the case of Elijah under the juniper tree. There is no doubt in my mind that his main trouble was that he was suffering from a reaction, a reaction after what had happened on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19).”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, quote from Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure


“I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound, as if a vessel filled with liquid had been placed on its side and now was slowly emptying out.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, quote from Annie John


“Ah the mad hearts of all of us.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Visions of Cody


“I wish that some time, long ago, something had not been said that was said, or something done that was not done. Something, had we known, which might have let him grow differently, something which would have seen him become another man than the bitter, bent thing I saw up there. It is best now if he is dead. But it is a waste of something that might have been.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Hand of Oberon


“The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.”
― John Taylor Gatto, quote from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education


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