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15 Stirring Quotes From The Life-changing Books Every Woman In Her 20s Should Read

15 Stirring Quotes From The Life-changing Books Every Woman In Her 20s Should Read

These books will soothe you; they will make you laugh and challenge your mind. They will grow you.

That's the hell of sand castles. They are always doomed. That's part of their beauty — their impermanence.

— Pamela Moore, Chocolates for Breakfast: A Novel

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She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

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Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

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It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll---then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

— Zadie Smith, White Teeth: A Novel

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She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one's thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.

— Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

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Sometimes I believe that love dies but hope springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that hope dies but love springs eternal. Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. Sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.

— Nora Ephron, Heartburn

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Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)

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He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.

— Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior: Stories

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To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook: A Novel

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Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

— Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

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It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

— Colette, The Collected Stories of Colette

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The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.

— Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

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Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel

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