292 Quotes by E. Lockhart

I looked at her. my lovely, tall mother with her pretty coil of hair and her hard, bitter mouth. Her veins were never open. Her heart never leapt out to flop helplessly on the lawn. She never melted into puddles. She was normal. Always. At any cost.

It was like being able to fight, she realized. And being able to change accents. They were powers that lived in your body. They would never leave you, no matter how you looked, no matter who loved or didn’t love you.

Be sad, be sorry-but don’t shoulder it.

We tossed stones into the water. We just existed.

You can’t have an ending. It’s impossible. Because unlike in the movies, life goes on. You’re never at the end until you die.

The counselor also suggested meditation. Finding a bit of time each day to focus on deep breathing and the acceptance of life as it was presently occurring. That was not a productive solution either. Frankie did not accept life as it was presently occurring. It was a fundamental element of her character. Life as it was presently occurring was not acceptable to her. Were she to mellow out – would she not become obedient? Would she not stay on the path that stretched ahead of her, nicely bricked?

You better live this life of yours while you can – real living, the kind where you get a little dirt on your halo – ’cause, babe, not one of us knows how long we got.

Like, in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is one big ambition machine. She’ll stop at zero. Jane Eyre has temper tantrums, throws herself on the floor. Pip in Great Expectations is deluded and money hungry. All of them want a better life and go after it, and all of them are morally compromised. That makes them interesting.

Yet another technique of the neglected positivist is to impose a new meaning on a word that exists but, through the convolutions of grammar, doesn’t technically mean what you are deciding it means. The neglected positive of incriminate is criminate, which actually, technically means the same thing as incriminate – because the in- isn’t really making a negative in this case – but it is much more amusing if you use it to mean the opposite.