In no particular order, here are 10 of my favourite quotes from literature, movies and TV.
Also: SPOILER WARNING FOR GONE GIRL.
1. “I won’t tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world’s voice, or the voice of society. They matter a great deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose! Oh, my love, choose.” - Lord Darlington, Lady Windemere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde
This is how Lord Darlington attempts to persuade Lady Windemere to marry him, even though it would disgrace her. My Lit teacher described this speech as “overwrought” and said it was in there to make us dislike Lord Darlington. I thought she was bonkers. I love this speech. I don’t care if it’s overwrought. Granted, Lord Darlington goes on to be kind of a prick in other ways, but damn… Dat speech though. I’ve thought of it every time I’ve thrown caution to the wind and made a “fuck it” sort of decision.
2. “I guess when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people with whom you’ll connect with. Later in life, you realise it only happens a few times.” - Celine, Before Sunset directed by Richard Linklater
Before Sunset is my favourite movie, and this is one of my favourite lines from it - even though it’s awkwardly phrased, almost as if the actress stumbled over the words in her lilting French accent. I don’t believe in The One in the way it’s usually described in pop culture - obviously there can’t only be one person in the whole world that we’re ‘destined’ to be with, that’s ridiculous. But I do think there are a limited number of people we can be romantically satisfied with, and of course, if something is rare, it becomes more precious.
3. “All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to - to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing, it was just this - sadness? - Ah, what is it? - that I heard.” - The Canary by Katherine Mansfield
This one is sort of like a Rorschach test, or a reverse Mirror of Erised. People look into the passage and see their deepest sadness reflected back at them. The narrator of the story could be referring to any number of things, but when I first read it, I was absolutely certain that she was talking about loneliness. Now that I’m a little older, I feel like she might be talking about the inherent meaninglessness of life, or a lack of purpose. Whose to say what the passage will make me think of when I’m older?
4. “Decisions take a split second. It’s not deciding that takes all the time.” - So Much For That by Lionel Shriver
This is part of what I was wrestling with in my blog post about pro/con lists. I am a person who makes decisions very slowly - I make pro/con lists, I ask everyone I know their opinion, I Google it - and yet, I still believe this quote to be true. Decisions happen instantly. Everything else is just a way of coming to terms with it.
5. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can’t ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange?” - Frankie, The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
This idea is often expressed in terms of, “How do we know that my blue and your blue are the same blue?” but there is a deeper existential angst that comes with only having access to our own consciousness. We can never truly know anything about the inner workings of another person. Not really. There’s something lonely about being alone inside one’s own head.
6. “Life isn’t just swimming with dolphins and climbing Machu Picchu though, is it? It’s everything. Drinking my delicious tea in this nice local cafe is living my life.” - Mark Corrigan, Peep Show
He’s rarely a font of wisdom, but I actually rather like this little moment from Mark. I almost included a quote from My Dinner with Andre on this list, but then I realised that it said basically the same thing, except in a much wordier way. Fuck the idea that only extraordinary lives are worth living, or only heightened experiences are worthwhile. Most of life is the boring stuff, so why not appreciate it?
7. “This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my own head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my own body. … When I have again neglected to colour the roots (of my hair) for three solid months, the camera chastises, but I know that walking around with gray down the centre part feels exactly the same as when the gray is covered. I’m not convinced that my elemental self even has hair. … Given that most people presumably contend with just this rattling disconnect between who they are to themselves and what they are to others, it’s perplexing why we’re still roundly obsessed with appearance. Having verified on our own accounts the feeble link between the who and the what, you’d think that from the age of three we’d have learned to look straight through the avatar as we do a pane of glass.” - Big Brother by Lionel Shriver
I didn’t realise anyone else felt this way until I read it in this novel. I’ve always had a fraught relationship with the beauty industry, and I’ve never really understood people who claim they wear make-up “for themselves.” How can wearing make-up have any effect whatsoever on your interior life? It doesn’t! I’d be much happier if I didn’t have a physical form at all, to be honest. Lionel Shriver and I seem very much alike in this way, except she was able to articulate it a thousand times better than I ever could.
8. “And mark this. Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents’ heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!” - Abigail Williams, The Crucible by Arthur Miller
I just think this line is fun and badass. Every time I read it, I want to say it aloud in my best Abigail Williams voice. I was always drawn to her character from The Crucible. So much so that I based the main character from the first novel I ever wrote on her. (In my version, she’s not quite so sociopathic.)
9. “I never know what to say when I can’t say everything I truly want to say.” - Nothing Happens Until It Happens To You by T. M. Shine
The book this line comes from is neither famous, nor high literature, nor even that great of a book. But it is a line that I think about on regular basis, because it’s so goddamn true. Almost every time I’ve struggled to think of something to say, it was because I was avoiding saying something else, and that elephant in the room became larger and larger, until I felt suffocated and unable to think about anything else. So, yeah. I never know what to say when I can’t say everything I truly want to say.
10. “That night, at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? ‘She’s a cool girl.’ Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are, above all, hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. ‘Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.’ … I’ve waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organise scrapbook parties and make out with each other, while we leer. And then we’d say, ‘Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy.’” - Amy, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
This Cool Girl speech is, in my opinion, part of why Gone Girl became the phenomenal bestseller it did. Every woman who read it - myself included - thought, “Yes. Yes, yes yes. Finally, someone said it.” Fuck the Cool Girl trope. But also… yeah, maybe don’t fake your own death and frame your husband for the murder either.