Dani Quotes

Whiskey, glass, pour, toss back, glare. Repeat. "Cop out," I slurred in retaliation, pointing the empty glass at Peter.
"Don't get drunk. Fuck. I need you sober," he yelled, snatching the glass out of my hand.
"There's the problem right there. You need me sober. You need my help. You need something from me." I laughed, tossing the bottle on the sofa, ignoring the glug glug glug as it emptied over my cushions. "And I just need you."
"Need me to what?" He asked with a huff, tipping the bottle right-side up.
"Nothing. I just need you," I whispered and flopped into a nearby recliner. ~ Dani Alexander

It's as if they've planned out my life for me and I'm expected to live it for them. I hate it. So I don't tell anyone much. It's easier that way." ~Dani O'Meara from the forthcoming amateur sleuth mystery, Dangerous Days for Dani ~ Claire A. Murray

After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: "You can say, "This is impossible, terrible.' Or you can say, 'This is beautiful, wonderful.' You can imagine that you're in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home. ~ Dani Shapiro

What if I cease to exist altogether? ~ Dani Harper

I took Dani and her girlfriends to your show while Cohen was overseas and all that shit was going down with her. It was the first time I had ever seen you outside of magazines and the television. I think I felt the kick of us even back then." Her ~ Harper Sloan

Between the storm howling outside and the darkness inside, things felt primed for danger. ~ Dani Pettrey

To hold the Gift is to protect the balance in all things and to restore harmony. To hold the Gift is to comfort the mind and spirit, and to heal both heart and body. To hold the Gift is to be a bridge between worlds and to be a bearer of light. ~ Dani Harper

You're early."
I give him a mutinous look. Of course he thinks my being early is about him. It's not. Mac was at Chester's last night at eight. I think she's hunting me. Since I can't be late to avoid her, I have to be early. "Watch broke. Thought I was on time."
"You don't wear a watch."
"See? I knew I had a problem. I'll just dash out and get one. Be back tomorrow. On time. ~ Karen Marie Moning

You'll never be just anything. A tsunami can never be 'just' a wave."
"Get off my chin."
"I like that about you. Waves are banal. Tsunamis reshape the Earth. Under the right circumstances, even entire civilizations."
I blink.
"You're going to be one hell of a woman one day, Dani. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Observations," he says.
"Four imperial Unseelie guards were the only commonality I was able to isolate endemic to both scenes." They'd been standing, armed, at the dock doors, overseeing the delivery.
He gives me a sidewise look. "Wow. That was, like, a whole sentence. With nouns and verbs and connective tissue. Endemic. Fancy word. ~ Karen Marie Moning

You can't help yourself, can you? You think the only thing to do with a parade is rain on it. Some people know to enjoy the parade because, dude, the rain always comes back. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state. ~ Dani Shapiro

You think you're going to chain me to a wall then stand here and tell me why it's okay that I am the way I am? That because of all the crap folks put me through when I was young it's all right that I turned out like this?
Dude, I don't have a problem with how I turned out. I like me. ~ Karen Marie Moning

He closes his hand around mine and I hold on. I like his hand. It's big and holds easy but sure. It's the kind of hold that says, I got you if you want me, but I'll let you go if you feel like running for a while. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Unlike national markets, which tend to be supported by domestic regulatory and political institutions, global markets are only 'weakly embedded'. There is no global lender of last resort, no global safety net, and of course, no global democracy. In other words, global markets suffer from weak governance, and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy. ~ Dani Rodrik

Yeah ... hey, you have a male here." Shay walked toward the hall, sniffing the air. "And he's human. Way to go, Dani! ~ Lia Davis

What is wrong with you?" He glared at me.


"I'm somewhat sure I'm suddenly gay," I shrugged, "My father and mother are hypocritical abandoning homophobic assholes. The former defending my chief suspect in the biggest case of my life - something I'm sure you had a hand in. I'm obsessed with your freckles, your bunny slippers and your lips - which I should be getting points for not kissing while you're incapacitated, by the way. I'm dating a whore while working on the vice squad - points to me again for not arresting your ass for that - and I'm ridiculously horny. Oh, and my fiancée won't talk to me. ~ Dani Alexander

I was not insecure. I was a perfectly normal combination of arrogant and narcissistic. ~ Dani Alexander

Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. ~ Dani Shapiro

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers. ~ Dani Shapiro

Maybe she'd remember him as a pain in the ass. Or maybe, he hoped most of all, that she'd remember what she told him: "You can be a real jerk sometimes, but you're decent."
As epitaphs went, it wasn't bad. ~ Dani Harper

In order to write a memoir, I've sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I've waited - sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair - for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I've been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings - that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it - are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters ~ Dani Shapiro

If I dismiss the ordinary - waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life ... To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories - to know that we are doing what we're supposed to be doing - is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, 'When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.' This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don't know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring. ~ Dani Shapiro

I go inside my head and become that other me, the one I don't tell anybody about.
The observer ...
I live in terror that one day I won't get to be Dani again. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Friends tell you what you want to hear," Dani said. "Real friends tell you what you need to hear. ~ Brenda Rothert

Nah. A date with Peter the prostitute. Sounds like a plan. Be sure to bring flowers."

"I was thinking condoms. But your idea sounds more romantic. ~ Dani Alexander

Madness is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.- The Joker ~ Paul Dani

Dani: "Warlock! You, pal, are the proverbial sight for sore eyes!"
Warlock: "Concern! Are selfriend's primary ocular sensors dysfunctional? ~ Chris Claremont

When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me. ~ Dani Shapiro

The more excited I get, the more I vibrate."
"Now there's a thought," Lor says.
"If you mean what I think you mean, you want to shut the fuck up and never think it again," Ryodan says. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Life's a choice: you can live in black and white, or you can live in colour. I'll take every shade of the rainbow and the gazillion in between! ~ Karen Marie Moning

Write the words "The FIve Senses" on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing. ~ Dani Shapiro

There are ledgers. Those I kill. Those I reward."
"There are legends. You used to be one."
"I am a legend."
"Dani's a legend. Not you."
"This Dani appears to matter to you."
"Always."
"Perhaps you had a funny way of showing it. ~ Karen Marie Moning

This sadness wasn't a huge part of me
I wasn't remotely depressed
but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179] ~ Dani Shapiro

Tell me something good about your life," I whispered, needing to hear that he wasn't as broken as I thought him to be.
Peter breathed into the handset for about two minutes. I began wondering if he was about to hang up, or had fallen asleep, when he answered. "You."
It was so quiet I almost didn't hear it. And then he hung up before I could ask him to repeat himself.
I fell asleep, grinning, with the phone still clutched in my hand and my milk souring on the coffee table. ~ Dani Alexander

We have arrived at one of the central paradoxes of economics: uniformity amid diversity. Economists work with a plethora of models, pointing in all kinds of contradictory directions. Yet when it comes to the issues of the day, their views often converge in ways that cannot be justified by the strength of the available evidence. ~ Dani Rodrik

There are a few absolute no-brainer rules in my world. Real close to the top of this list is: if an Unseelie prince runs from it, I'm going to run from it, too. [said Dani] ~ Karen Marie Moning

God's ways often didn't make sense upon first glance. ~ Dani Pettrey

The Tylwyth Teg were immortal beings, but the burden of living for endless millennia was often tedium. It was one reason that the Fair Ones tended to play terrible pranks upon mortals. Like bored children, they sprang upon the unwary, seeking diversion. So it had been when a weary Celtic warrior turned reluctant gladiator had fought his way to freedom at last. Wounded and near death, pursued by his former captors, he'd blundered straight into the territory of the Tylwyth Teg in the steep hills northwest of Isca Silurum ... . ~ Dani Harper

What does somebody like you want? More power? More toys? More sex?"
"All of the above. All the time."
"Greedy bugger."
"Kid, let me tell you something. Most people spend their short time in this world less than half alive. They wander through their days in a haze of responsibility and resentment. Something happens to them not long after they're born. They get conflicted about what they want and start worshipping the wrong gods. Should. Mercy. Equality. Altruism. There's nothing you should do. Do what you want. Mercy isn't Nature's way. She's an equal opportunity killer. We aren't born the same. Some are stronger, smarter, faster. Never apologize for it. Altruism is an impossible concept. There's no action you can make that doesn't spring from how you want to feel about yourself. Not greedy, Dani. Alive. And happy about it every single fucking day. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I'm his locomotive and he's my shield. ~ Karen Marie Moning

When I thought I'd killed him, I felt more alone than I've felt in a long time. Like I couldn't stand walking through this city knowing he wasn't in it. Like somehow, as long as he was out there somewhere, if I was ever really in trouble, I knew where I could go and while maybe he wouldn't do exactly what I wanted him to do, he'd keep me alive. He'd get me through whatever it was to live another day. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Books are like ice cream; there is a flavor for everyone! ~ K. Lamb

When Peter said he was
romantic, it was in the way that I was romantic. A blow job and
an "I love you" before rolling over and falling asleep. ~ Dani Alexander, Shattered Glass

I'm almost used to you showing up without shoes, but where the hell are your pants? ~ Dani Harper

You may as well tell our readers that death and taxes are coming back. ~ Dani Kollin

If you hear voices, you're a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you're an author. ~ Dani Harper

The ocean settled her soul like nothing else. Being near God's creation reminded her of His sovereignty and majesty. Setting the moon in the sky to control the tides . . . it awed her. Jesus walking on water, calming the storm . . . Knowing He tamed something so wild and free settled her soul in a way nothing else did. ~ Dani Pettrey

I was going to be mature about this. And ignore him. ~ Dani Alexander, Shattered Glass

The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty. ~ Dani Shapiro

I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are. ~ Dani Shapiro

There are more balls in twenty feet of street here then there are in all of Dublin, and I'm proud to be swaying in the nut sack. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Dani said this woman, with whom she'd lived for two years, had never known her. "I feel like people accept the first thing I show them," she said, "and that's all I ever am to them. ~ Mary Gaitskill

My mother is a pastor. I think she has her moments where she's like, 'Dani, what are you getting into,' but at the end of the day, she really supports me as an actor. ~ Danielle Brooks

The only thing that keeps us rooted in the past is our refusal to embrace the present.
Dude, you gotta hug it with both arms and legs and hold on tight! The present is all we've got. That's why they call it a present! ~ Karen Marie Moning

We have to go," I replied, ready to throw everything I felt for Peter in the nearest trash and tie up the bag. Let it fester there with my already condemned sanity. ~ Dani Alexander

I'm very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet. ~ Dani Shapiro

I've never wanted someone as fiercely as I want you, Dani-girl."
The tone of his voice is so heartbreaking that my chest clenches.
"I wish it were a different world. One where I wasn't leaving and our future wasn't unknown. If it were, you would have been mine already. ~ Harper Sloan

I liked to pretend I was noble, to tell myself I wouldn't draw someone into the fire, but threatened with the safety of the people I loved, I wouldn't even hesitate. ~ Lindsey Fairleigh

At fourteen, I'd vowed, one day, I'd be the woman making him laugh, making joy blaze from his face, so tangible it seemed I might catch it in my hands. ~ Karen Marie Moning

The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I've ever encountered. If you're writing on a computer, the very instrument you're writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations. ~ Dani Shapiro

a stupidity it is to believe that someone could made a door and could not open it ~ Anwar Dani

Love is funny. Even though you don't have that person anymore, you still have the feeling. You didn't lose your LOVE. You lost the tangible, tactile, sense-sational ability to experience the person or animal you lost. ~ Karen Marie Moning

He's painting your living room as a thank you."
"Huh. My decorator might screech, but I'm okay with that."
"Your decorator? Seriously? How did you not know you were gay? ~ Dani Alexander

When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand. ~ Dani Shapiro

I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life. ~ Dani Shapiro

But [religious faith]'s not extinct, Janet. It's become nearly universal in the fleet and is growing very quickly in the Alliance."

"Yes, and that's why I cannot now or I think ever will have a chosen faith. There should be no pressure for the path one takes. Oh, it's no secret that Islam has more of an appeal to me than the others, but Allah understands this as he understands all things. The notion of faith is, I believe, far more important than the choice of a particular one."

"And what of the unfaithful?" asked Justin. "What of them?"

"If they have faith, I believe they'll have greater understanding of things; if not, I can't order someone to believe. It would be stupid to try and evil to force someone to pretend. As if God wants frightened adherents bowing on trembling knees. The harm all those fanatics did before the Grand Collapse," she said with true rancor, "those idiots I'd shoot, if I had the ability. ~ Dani Kollin

We're all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community. ~ Dani Shapiro

Listen, Sean," Dani says. "I need you to do something. My treatment isn't over yet, and my mom and I still have rough times ahead. We need people we can really rely on. So think about whether you can be that person. If you're going to be into my mother, be really into her. ~ Janet Ruth Young

He sniffed her. The rubbery black nose inhaled deeply as it passed back and forth over her face, along her throat, her ears. Jeez, it was like being vacuumed-only most Hoovers didn't have the potential to bite her face off. ~ Dani Harper

What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens - that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube - formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine - at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village - and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life. ~ Dani Shapiro

In a famous hoax, physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to a leading journal of cultural studies purporting to describe how quantum gravity could produce a "liberatory postmodern science." The article, which parodied the convoluted style of argument in the fashionable academic world of cultural studies, was promptly published by the editors. Sokal announced that his intention was to test the intellectual standards of the discipline by checking whether the journal would publish a piece "liberally salted with nonsense." Sokal, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," April 15, 1996, ~ Dani Rodrik

Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children's book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they've ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa - two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season. ~ Meg Donohue

I hated smoking. The smell alone was enough to nauseate me. But right then, more than anything, I wanted to be that cigarette. ~ Dani Alexander

Because God doesn't promise the way will be easy-far from it-but He promises to carry us through, to give us the courage and grace we need when we need it. He most often doesn't change the circumstances; He changes us ~ Dani Pettrey

I made a mental note to call. Later.
Tomorrow. Next month. Or January. ~ Dani Alexander

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers. ~ Dani Shapiro

I'm gonna give one of 'em my virginity one day." She preened. I was momentarily dumbstruck. I couldn't begin to enumerate all the things that were appalling about that possibility. "We so have to talk," I finally managed. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself. ~ Dani Shapiro

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.' ~ Dani Shapiro

Now it's going to turn into the biggest media blitz since the Pope's divorce. ~ Dani Kollin

Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand. ~ Dani Shapiro

You know what I find ironic? My homophobic mother offers
you her cabbage rolls as a truce and you respond by asking her if
it was 'tacit approval' to suck my cock."
"She shoved a phallic symbol my way and told me to eat it. ~ Dani Alexander

When Christian pushes into the brick wall of the building catty-corner to the rear of BB&B - first left on the Dark Zone side - and disappears, I melt down in a fit of the giggles. I toss a rock at the spot where he vanished. It bounces off the brick and clatters to the cobblestone. I'm feeling twenty shades of Harry Potter's train station, especially when he pokes his head out of the wall and says impatiently, Come on, lass. This is hardly my favorite place to be. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Dude. Post-apocalyptic world. Who does job applications anymore?"
"I do."
I squint at it, then him. "What are you paying me?" I angle.
"Dude. Post-apocalyptic world. Who does money anymore."
I snicker. First sign of any sense of humor he's shown. Then I remember where I am and why. I wad it up and throw it at him. It bounces off his chest. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Funny how being a grown-up didn't make you any less glad to have a mom on the scene. Whether it was your own or someone else's mother, it was like having the cavalry arrive. ~ Dani Harper

Suck on this, Edward. ~ Dani Smith

We were like bananas. Stuck together, we were ripe and yellow. But the moment one was torn apart, all the rest turned black and rotten. ~ Kit Lyman

Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you're capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that's happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches you as you vanish. ~ Dani Shapiro

We're very mindful of the reprehensible things done in God's name and the price paid by humanity for that evil. I cannot tell you the revulsion we feel when we study about the abomination of calling for a believer to be killed for the reason that his or her belief in the Lord is different from your own. Frankly, they deserved near extinction. ~ Dani Kollin

Katie was a starlit night filled with the bursts of fireflies. She was the pummel and front of a waterfall booming in his ears, the surge of a plane netting into the bright blue sky, pressing him back against the seat, his chest tightening with excitement. ~ Dani Pettrey

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don't want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn't just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know - if we know anything at all - is how to write the book we're writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won't succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt - spectacularly, brazenly - into the unknown. ~ Dani Shapiro

There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job. ~ Dani Shapiro

Hard-ons don't make you think less. They make you think stupid. ~ Dani Alexander

Field experiments to date have shown that microfinance - the provision of small loans, typically to women or groups of women - is not particularly effective in reducing poverty.14 ~ Dani Rodrik

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way. ~ Dani Shapiro

I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank. ~ Dani Shapiro

Peter to Austin:
Hard-ons don't make you think less. They make you think stupid. Which makes me think you must have one 24/7. ~ Dani Alexander

I feel like I'm stuck in an IFCF." I raised a brow. "Interdimensional Fairy Cluster Fuck," she said sourly. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and all my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and decent person. [p. 128] ~ Dani Shapiro