Quotes from The Weird Sisters

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.
"How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!
"I don't know," she said, shrugging.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup, given that it caused her to realize the emotion that she had thought was her not liking him very much was, in fact, her not liking him at all. Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“we all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done-maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Instead, we'd do what we always did, the only thing we'd ever been dependably stellar at: we'd read.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“I keep waiting to feel old, to feel like a grown-up, but I don't yet. Do you think that's the big secret adults keep from you? That you never feel like a grown-up?”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Not me, of course, as I am now officially a spinster librarian and must stay home with my cat and drink tea.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“What I mean is, I still feel like me. It's not like I wake up and think, I am a responsible adult. I just look in the mirror and see myself. the same stupid person I've been looking at for years.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“How old were you when you first realized that your parents were human? That they were not omnipotent, that what they said did not, in fact, go, they had dreams and feelings and scars? Or have you not realized that yet?Do you still call your parents and have a one-sided conversation with them, child to parent, not adult to adult?”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Oh honey, we’re all fuckups in our own special ways.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Long ago she had thought bravery equaled wandering, the power was in the journey. Now she knew that, for her, it took no courage to leave; strength came from returning. Strength lay in staying.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Our estrangement is not drama-laden- we have not betrayed one another's trust, we have not stolen lovers or fought over money or property or any of the things that irreparably break families apart. The answer, for us, is much simpler.
See, we love one another. We just don't happen to like one another very much.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“The question to ask is what will satisfy you? What will bring you peace? And perhaps the answer to those is in asking yourself when you were last happy.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Sisters keep secrets.
Because sisters' secrets are swords.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Forgetting wasn’t the same as being happy. Being drunk wasn’t the same as forgetting … we were at our most miserable when we’re doing it to ourselves.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“We all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, or too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done - maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made...And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself. Stop defining yourself in terms of them. You don't just have to exist in the empty spaces they leave. There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“The library drew Bean down the street, as it had drawn all of us over the years. Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.
"How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on?”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“These were the kind [of letters] you save, folded into a memory box, to be opened years later with fingers against crackling age, heart pounding with the sick desire to be possessed by memory.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“We think, in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, "We'll take it.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“He had the singular ability to knock down her carefully bricked defenses, which was a compliment to them both and the secret to their love.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“she wondered how she could have spent all that money and have nothing but clothes and accessories and a long list of men she never wanted to see again to show for it”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“There is nothing that is not beautiful about bread. The way it grows, from tiny grains, from bowls on the counter, from yeast blooming in a measuring cup like swampy islands. The way it fills a room, a house, a building, with its inimitable smells, submits to a firmly applied fist and contracts, swells again; the way it stretches and expands upon kneading, the warm, supple feel of it against skin. The sight of a warm roll on a table, the taste-sweet, sour, yeasty on the tongue.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

“Yes, you'd make a great partner for him. What with the embezzling and the adultery and the drinking. That's what every man wants in a wife - a vaguely alcoholic, fornicating thief.”
― Eleanor Brown, quote from The Weird Sisters

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― Derrick Jensen, quote from The Culture of Make Believe

“most students reported a state of total involvement in what was being taught, he would rate the moment “inspired.” The inspired moments of learning shared the same active ingredients: a potent combination of full attention, enthusiastic interest, and positive emotional intensity. The joy in learning comes during these moments. Such joyous moments, says University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, signify “optimal physiological coordination and smooth running of the operations of life.” Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, has long been a pioneer in linking findings in brain science to human experience. Damasio argues that more than merely letting us survive the daily grind, joyous states allow us to flourish, to live well, and to feel well-being. Such upbeat states, he notes, allow a “greater ease in the capacity to act,” a greater harmony in our functioning that enhances our power and freedom in whatever we do. The field of cognitive science, Damasio notes, in studying the neural networks that run mental operations, finds similar conditions and dubs them “maximal harmonious states.”
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“Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.”
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“I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up

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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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