Quotes from What Happened to Lani Garver

“Complete happiness can look so much like complete terror that its hard to tell them apart.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“If you can understand human behavior, it can’t hurt you nearly as much.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“You're supposed to be kind to everyone, because you never know when you're meeting an angel.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“There are times in life to grow, and there are times in life to shine. One can't grow and shine at the same time; it just doesn't work that way. Now you're growing. Tomorrow you'll shine.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“He says you don't often find angels in places like happy homes and rich people's backyard parties. He says that angels flock to places like hospitals and homelss shelters and jails, because those people realize they need help. And do they are able to believe in strange phenomena. Funny how the world is backward. The really comfortable people don't always see much supernaturally, and to the ones who have to struggle, it's, like, breathing in their faces. The first are last... and the last are first.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“If people knew who the angels were, they would be very nice when they saw one and would still do their same evil garbage when they thought none were around. Knowing who they are defeats the purpose.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“If a life goes down the toilet, it comes out in a river and meets the sea.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“Don't you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth. Any more than it's going to topple a skyscraper. There's truth, and there's belief. Don't call a mule a stallion.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“You gotta pay your dues to sing the blues.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“I don’t really think our greatest memories are always great while they’re happening.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“Sometimes it has to feel worse before it feels better.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“Don't tell people you care about them when all you really care about is getting your own way.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“Some doctors say a person who has only had same-sex attractions is, like, a zero. A person who has only had opposite-sex attractions is, like, a ten. He says most people fall between one and nine.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“Of all those books you've read? There's got to be something, somewhere in them, to help us laugh at a situation like this.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“Problem with the big philosophers is they cared about ideas more than people. Hegel would probably have stepped over a guy trying to slit his wrists outside a bar — to get to all the people he could sit and bullshit with inside. Did you know half of philosophy was first put into words by people shot in the ass?”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“People create their own little hells. They don’t need my help”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“My mom always said that people admire you for your strengths, but they love you for your faults. They love you for all your imperfections, which make them more comfortable with their own imperfect lives.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“The deep doesn't bother swallowing just anybody. The sea takes the extraordinary and leaves the rest be”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“World is all backward… It’s like…we’re through the looking glass. Good is bad, bad is good. Black is white, white is black. People base their lives on convenient recollections and are considered sane. People who look too hard for truth are considered crazy.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“There is truth. There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn’t going to change the truth.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

“The truth will set you free, and then you shall be free indeed.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver

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Popular quotes

“You are the greatest comfort for exhausted spirits. By the weight of your tenets and the delightfulness of your singing you have so refreshed me that I now think myself capable of facing the blows of Fortune. You were talking of cures that were rather sharp. The thought of them no longer makes me shudder; in fact I'm so eager to hear more, I fervently beg you for them.'

'I knew it,' She replied. 'Once you began to hang onto my words in silent attention, I was expecting you to adopt this attitude, or rather, to be more exact, I myself created it in you. The remedies still to come are, in fact, of such a kind that they taste bitter to the tongue, but grow sweet once they are absorbed.
But you say you are eager to hear more. You would be more than eager to hear if you knew the destination I am trying to bring you to.'

I asked what it was and she told me that it was true happiness.

'Your mind dreams of it,' she said, 'but your sight is clouded by shadows of happiness and cannot see reality.'

I begged her to lead on and show me the nature of true happiness without delay.

'For you,' she said, 'I will do so gladly.”
― Boethius, quote from The Consolation of Philosophy

“an average infantryman records one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended.”
― Lee Child, quote from A Wanted Man

“The delegates to the peace conference after World War I "tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

“Smokers always waxed poetic about the ritual of it, how a large part of the satisfaction was packing the box and pulling the foil wrapper and plucking an aromatic stick. They claimed they loved the lighting, the ashing, the feeling of being able to hold something between their fingers. That was all well and good, but there was nothing quite like actually smoking it: Leigh loved inhaling. To pull with your lips on that filter and feel the smoke drift across your tongue, down your throat, and directly into your lungs was to be transported momentarily to nirvana. She remembered- every day- how it felt after the first inhale, just as the nicotine was hitting her bloodstream. A few seconds of both tranquility and alertness, together, in exactly the right amounts. Then the slow exhale- forceful enough so that the smoke didn't merely seep from your mouth but not so energetic that it disrupted the moment- would complete the blissful experience.”
― Lauren Weisberger, quote from Chasing Harry Winston

“Everything that can be said with words can be contradicted with words, so what’s the point of dissertations, novels, literature? Or put another way: whatever we say is true we can also always say is untrue. It is a zero point and the place from which the zero value begins to spread. However, it is not a dead point, not for literature either, for literature is not just words, literature is what words evoke in the reader. It is this transcendence that validates literature, not the formal transcendence in itself, as many believe.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

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