Every Exquisite Thing
Matthew Quick
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it.”
“And then one day you will look for you in the mirror and you’ll no longer be able to identify yourself—you’ll only see everyone else. You’ll know that you did what they wanted you to do. You will have assimilated. And you will hate yourself for it, because it will be too late.”
“People enter our lives for a season, a reason, or a lifetime.”
“I knew that I had reached the end of childhood once I realized that adults in my life didn't know anymore than I did.”
“Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages.”
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
“There are a lot of lonely kids in this world, but the problem is they don’t know about each other.”
“Sometimes you just have to pick a direction and make mistakes. Then you use what you learn from your failure to pick new, better directions so you can make more mistakes and keep learning.”
“There are no such things as fictional characters.”
“We live in our heads... which can be very scary places. We forget that we are not just and I, but a she and a you, too. We forget to see ourselves as others see us. For some people, the problem is narcissism - meaning they are selfish, too self-absorbed. But I think that your problem is that you are too selfless. You care about the needs of others more than you care about your own needs. You are strong for them even when it's a detriment to your own well-being.”
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Book Keywords:
coming-of-age, growing-up
