Marian Keyes Famous Quotes
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I'm not looking for pity, I'm really not, but I'm constantly uneasy and every day it is pretty much like getting up and going to war. Once I shift into the mindset of 'Yeah, you're alive. It's tough. Let's do what we can today,' it's easier.
However, often when fatal things are happening, you don't know at the time that they're fatal. You get an inkling that they're Not Good, that they Haven't Helped, but only the passage of time will reveal just how bad they are.
Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Which is very annoying to discover when you're right in the middle of one.
Back at my parents', Mum was waiting with a muffin for me. 'Banana and pecan. I know it's the wrong colour but would you try it? Are you okay?' she asked. 'You look a bit …'
'Grand,' I said. 'It's just the clouds. When it's overcast like this, it does my head in.'
A strange expression passed over her face. 'The sky is blue.'
I took a look out of the window; the sky was blue. 'When did that happen?'
'It's been blue all morning.'
But it didn't make things any better. I was still uneasy, just in a different way. The empty sky looked hard and cold and merciless. Couldn't they have put in some clouds to soften it up a bit?
I am different when my nails are done. I am more dynamic. I gesticulate more, I am better at scaring my staff. I can indicate impatience by drumming on tabletops and I can wrap up a meeting with a few choice clatters.
Many nations use language simply to convey information, but it's different in Ireland. With most conversational exchanges you get an 'added extra' like the free little biscuit you sometimes get with a cappuccino in a fancy coffee place.
He'd done his walls with paint from Holy Basil. God, I yearned for their colors. I hadn't been able to afford them myself but I knew their color chart like the back of my hand. His hall was done in Gangrene, his stairs in Agony and his living room
unless I was very much mistaken
in Dead Whale. Colors I personally very much approved of.
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.
In the same way that the stewards on the Titanic were more concerned about the unemptied ashtrays on the bar than the enormous hole in the side of the ship which was letting in zillions of gallons of water, I too was worrying about the unimportant and ignoring the vital. Sometimes it's easier that way. Because although there was little I could do about the huge hole, it was within my power to empty an asthray.
Accepting all that is given to me and all that is taken away. Recognizing that even loss and pain are gifts.
One day we'll all be dead, and none of this will matter
-The Brightest Star in the Sky.
Here's how it is: I feel guilty about every single bite of food that goes into my mouth.
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.
I don't like this idea of division: that if you're a clever woman then you've got to be a particular way. Because men don't. Men please themselves.
He seemed wild and dangerous and carefree
well, he would, would'nt he? What were motorcycles and black leather pants if not the uniform of a wild, dangerous and carefree man?
Why do we have such a finite capacity for pleasure but an infinite one for pain?
The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin's cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look. Claire (Watermelon)
I awake. I don't mean to but clearly I have not appeased the Sleep Gods with enough offerings.
You have the look of someone who'll die under general anaesthetic while having liposuction.
Are you close to your family?'
I considered it. 'Close' was one way of putting it. 'We're close,' I said cautiously. 'But we're very mean to each other. This morning I told my mum that if she didn't stop acting old I was going to lobby for a law on euthanasia, so a bus would come round every Monday morning and take away all the old people who complained that they couldn't hear the telly or see the buttons on their mobile phone or that they had a pain in their hip, and put a bullet in their heads. But we're close.
Every day I wake up afraid that I won't be able to write, that today is the day it has left me.
When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.
As I get older the stars have gone from my eyes more, and I see that life is just something that has to be lived with, that it's better not to struggle.
I rang my mother to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out?
I'd rather eat nothing than eat a carrot.
The landscape of the desert changes very gradually as little breezes lift grains of sand and move them, sometimes a few feet, sometimes miles and miles, so that at the end of the day, when the sun sets, the face of the desert is completely different from the landscape it had in the morning when the sun rose on it.
I used to write in bed, starting when I woke up. I believe that creative work comes from our subconscious mind, so I try to keep the gap between sleep and writing as minimal as possible.
I couldn't stand to be alone. But there was no one that I wanted to be with. And no matter where I was, I wanted to be somewhere else. No matter who I was with, no matter what I was doing, no matter where I was, it was wrong, I didn't want it. Every night, I sat with crowds of people and I felt totally alone.
Insomnia is an enemy that attacks in many forms. Sometimes it shows up the moment I get into bed and lingers for a couple of hours. Other nights, it stays away until about 5 a.m. and then butts in and hangs around until twenty minutes before the alarm is due to go off. It's a full-time job, battling the fecker.
It never rains but it damn well pours and I was afraid I'd be washed away in the deluge.
If it was that beautiful, why did I leave you
That's the thing with relationships, I understood: it doesn't mean we don't hurt one another; how can we help it sometimes, we're only human. But if you love someone, you get hurt and you manage to forgive. And be forgiven.
Nkechi never tried to hide her bottom. She was proud of it. Fascinating to me. Irish girls' lives were a constant quest for bottom-disguising or bottom-reducing clothing tactics. We can learn much from other cultures.
They were very, very kind to each other and, in my discombobulated state, this was soothing.
Although will never love anyone again, don't want to become bitter. Or creative.
You have a magnificent moustache. You must be very proud of it.
He's a waiter, not a Mafia stooge, so what's he going to do? Blac pepper them to death? Compliment them into a coma? Run them over with the dessert trolley?
I'm trying ... " How could I put it? "I'm trying to get far enough down the line so that I can remember." I stopped, then continued: "so that I can remember without the pain killing me"
And the days were stacking up. And weeks. And months. It was now almost the middle of June and he'd died in February, but I still felt like I'd just woken from a horrible dream, that I was suspended in that stunned, paralyzed state between sleep and reality where I was grasping for, but couldn't get a handle on normality.
Smarter than me. But here's the thing my life did get better. I made a decision to let go of my dreams, because they were killing me, and I stopped asking the impossible of myself. I changed my attitude and decided to focus on what I had rather than what i didn't have.
The back windows looked out over the fields, then the Atlantic, maybe a hundred yards away. Actually, I'm just making that bit up. I had no idea how far away the sea was. Only men could do things like that. "Half a mile." "Fifty yards." Giving directions, that sort of thing. I could look at a woman and say "Thirty-six C." Or "Let's try it in the next size up." But I had no idea how far away Tim's sea was except that I wouldn't want to walk to it in high heels.
You could have nothing with a teenage daughter in the house, not mascara, not ankle boots, not breadknives, not sedatives; they took everything, selfish little bitches!
I am prone to despair. We are all born with a particular personality. I get afraid and then I don't want to leave the house.
Where's that guy with the coffee?' 'I'm here.' Mannix had appeared. 'You went to Costa Rica for the beans?
Instead of thinking, "Why me?" I think, "Why not me?"' Extract from One Blink at a Time In
Political correctness is a minefield
Chick Lit uses humor to reflect life back to us. It's a very comforting genre, and it's the first time our generation has had a voice. It's a very important genre for all of those reasons.
Love and kindness go hand in hand.
It actually felt harder, not easier, to be with people. The toughest challenge was my face; maintaining a 'normal' expression was utterly exhausting.
At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.
Get over it, and if you can't get over it, get over talking about it.
Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.
Our health is our wealth.
Even she couldn't believe she'd spent so much money on household appliance. Money that she could just as easily have spend on handbags or bottles of wine. The only conclusion she could draw was that she was finally grown-up. Which was funny because in her head she was still sixteen and trying to decide what to do when she left school.
I went grey at 12, my eyesight went at 17. I've been a crock from very early on.
So I'm back again to the eternal question, the one that has plagued me all my life: How Do Other People Do It? How come they were given life's rule book and I missed out? Where was I when God was dispensing capability and cop on? Looking at shoes, probably.
That's like the dog calling the cat's arse hairy!
When God closes one door, He slams another in your face
I should have learned mindfulness, and it's too late now because it's no good learning it when you're already in crisis: you have to start when things are good. But only the very, very oddest would think, Hey, my life is perfect. I know! I'll sit and waste twenty minutes Observing My Thoughts without Judgement.
To be able to scratch the sole of my foot using the big toe of the other foot is nothing short of a miracle.
I forced myself to stop thinking about it. I went to the room in my brain where all my thoughts about Adam lived and disconnected the electricity and boarded up all the doors and windows, so nothing could get out.
Obviously it was very unsightly. There were bound to be complaints from the neighboring thoughts. But I had no choice.
A thought struck me: maybe I wouldn't ever be the real me again. Because the only thing that would snap things back to the way they were, would be if he had't died.
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.
It's not like you take the right turning and you get everlasting happiness and you take the wrong one and your life's a disaster. In real life it's often impossible to tell which decision is the one you should make because what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose are sometimes-often-neck and neck.
Before I knocked the antidepressant back, I had a little word with it. Work, I urged. Take away this awful, awful feeling.
After a pause he says, 'Trust you to bring everything back to sweets.' He is a fine one to talk, him and his birds.
In an unpredictable and unpleasant world it was both unusual and very pleasant to hear what I wanted to hear.
Is it not strange,' she said, 'that a little cruelty makes them love me all the more?
Don't make the mistake of letting pride get in the way of forgiveness. You still love him. He still loves you. Don't throw it all away just because your feelings are hurt.
Look," she sighed. "You might be a lovely lad, in fairness you look like a lovely lad, but I can't take the chance. My kids wouldn't even be able to remember what I was wearing to tell the police. And all the recent photographs of me are bad, very jowly. I couldn't have them stuck to the lamp posts around the city. On your way, son." (Woman to Matt, when he tried to give her a lift.)
Temporary Insanity had come a-knocking and I had shouted "Come on in the door is open." Luckily, Reality had come unexpectedly and found Temporary Insanity roaming the corridors of my mind unchecked, going into rooms, opening cupboards, reading my letters, looking in my underwear drawer, that kind of thing. Reality had run and got Sanity. And after a tussle, they both had managed to throw out Temporary Insanity and slam the door in his face. Temporary Insanity now lay on the gravel in the driveway of my mind, panting and furious, shouting, "She invited me in, you know. She asked me in. She wanted me there.
I know of people who don't believe it, but depression is an illness, but unlike, say, a broken leg, you don't know when it'll get better.
I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'
When happiness makes a guest appearance in one's life,it's important to make the most of it.It may not stay around for long and when it has gone wouldn't it be terrible to think that all the time one could have been happy was wasted worrying when the happiness would be taken away.
As if, within their high-pitched cries and songs, there are coded threats. 'Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you get what you need and sometimes you get what you get.' Extract
Honestly, if you're looking for love and you're not too choosy, hang around a hardware store fingering screws.
I'd rather dig a ditch than go to a dinner party with people I don't know.
If it don't come back, it was never yours. If it comes back, it's yours to keep.
Some people can make their ears move - it's their party trick. Don't feel bad if you can't do it. Just find yourself another party trick.
I've been so showered in life, beyond my wildest dreams, such as having a loving partner I never thought I'd have.
But I thought that if people behaved like victims they would become victims, if people expected the worst to happen then it invariably did.
I could see now how wrong I was. Sometimes people don't volunteer to be victims and they become victims anyway.
Love is an emotion. It can't be seen or touched, and it is experienced differently by everyone, therefore it is difficult to measure.
Mum insists on calling Sat Nav "the Talking Map," like she's a medieval peasant who believes in witchcraft.
Unless it was an elaborate double-bluff on Wayne's part and it was so obvious as to be not obvious at all … Christ, it was too early in the morning for this sort of mental gymnastics.
Wasn't this the man who had made hot-water bottles for me every month when I got my period,
I'm quite introverted but I'm not shy.
Men can be men and still get excited about other men kicking a ball around and they're never mocked, whereas it's easy for women to take mocking on board, to be belittled. Because we're used to it.
They seem like a different race to me and I make sure never to get into disagreements with them, because any puny thing I say gets dashed on the rocks of their robust, shouty certainty.
I have a habit of taking instant dislikes to people. Simply because it saves time.
My mother is the best storyteller. And her mother was too.
If you lose someone, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. There's a point to the pain. There's a reason and a direction.
For all of my life it was the size of my rear that caused me the most hand-wringing, but in this nearly-50 zone it is my stomach that is the problem. It seems to have broken free from its moorings and there is no knowing how far it will roam.
Ireland?" "Small wet place across the Irish Sea," Barry offered kindly. "Where they drink a lot?" Lisa said faintly. "And they never stop talking. That's the place.
Having to be nice to people, which, as everyone knows, is the toughest job in the world
I suppose I wanted to have my cake and eat it.
But then again, what were you going to do with your cake if not eat it?
Frame it?
Use it as a sachet in your underwear drawer?
Perhaps one day in the far-off future, when I'm about eighty-nine, I might look back and say, "When I was a young-ish woman I fell in love with an intense charismatic man. He was way out of my league and when it ended it nearly killed me, but every woman should experience that sort of love once in their lives. Only once, mind, you mightn't survive a second bout. A bit like dengue fever, that way." I
I'd always felt that there was only a finite amount of good fortune in the universe to go around.
Why would we 'swing' when we had praying?
But that's the point, Amy. It's easy to love someone when they're on their best behaviour - you can do that in your sleep. The real test is when they're - to use Neeve's expression - a pain in the hole. That's what love actually means.
I never wear flats. My shoes are so high that sometimes when I step out of them, people look around in confusion and ask, "Where'd she go?" and I have to say, "I'm down here.
I'm proud of what I write and feel endorsed by my readers.