29 Quotes by Hilary Thayer Hamann

When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life’s severest confidence. You are undeceived.

It’s better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won’t get it.

Boys will be boys, that’s what everyone always says. But no one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether.

Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling.

Mine is not a smiling face. Strangers on the street always say, Smile! But my muscles do not naturally go there.

It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can’t talk to your friends; it wasn’t that my friends were untrustworthy, it’s just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life.

Sometimes all you’ve accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident.

When you stop looking forward to things, you get used to low expectations and you realise, what’s the big deal about success anyway? If we’re all to attain everything we’ve been conditioned to desire – wealth, fame, education, prestige, security – then those things will become so prevalent that they’ll become meaningless.

The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever – a hunter.