Eleanor Brown Quotes

Oh honey, we're all fuckups in our own special ways.

When I open my eyes to a painting, it is as though everything has changed and will never be the same again. Colors look more vivid, the lines and edges of objects sharper, and I fall in love with the world and all its beauty - the tragedies and love stories on the faces of people walking by,

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.

The wanderlust crept up again inside her like a shooting star, a sudden, violent urge to escape disappearing into darkness again. She pushed down the afterglow and focused.

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.

Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.

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?

we came home because we were failures

Sisters keep secrets.
Because sisters' secrets are swords.

After our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week's reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air.

Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder ...

I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.

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.

Your own Fear is the greatest obstacle you will ever face on your journey. Let your Faith be bigger than your Fear.

August is a teacher's longest Sunday -Weird Sisters

There is no problem a library card can't solve.

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.

Sleeping was impossible, and we would often be found wandering the house, our white nightgowns gleaming in the darkness, a trio of Lady Macbeths, driven mad by the mercury.

How different her mother's world was from hers. How different our mothers' worlds are from all of ours.

Here's one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it's damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. Look, the sheer fact that people have banged out book after article after dramatic interpretation of this guy should tell you that despite his eloquence, he wasn't the clearest of communicators.

Hurts and disappointments can hold gifts.

I'm just like this speed bump in the middle, slowing everyone down because I keep fucking up.

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.

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.

There is nothing that isn't beautiful about bread.

We don't just come from the womb bearing our talents. They grow from all the things we learn.

Imagine what could happen if we all had the heart to be who we truly are.

Self-care isn't selfish (it is a gift to all concerned). You can't serve from an empty vessel.

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

A highly cultivated taste, a taste that is knowledgeable and eclectic, is likely to be exciting and provocative, a personal taste at its highest level.

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.

We've all done foolish, foolish things, dear. In my experience, good people punish themselves far more than any external body can manage. And I believe you are a good person. You may have lost your way more than a little bit, but I believe you can find your way back. That's the trick. Finding your way back.

Tell me: what's more obscene than fucking waste?
Death is in quite poor taste, if you ask me.

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.

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?

Cordy slept late, awakening only when the noises of the house and the insistent sunlight became to obvious to be believably incorporated into her dreams any longer.

Allow yourself to experience fully every step of the journey, both the joy and the pain. You're alive. Greet the moment at hand with a grateful heart.

She did not want him. Had she ever? It is so easy to look at love when it is over and think it was never real.

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.

But Rose learned an important lesson: people don't always do what you tell them to do.

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.

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.