I love how quotable this book turned out to be. Everything I Know About Love serves as a heartfelt reminder that you are not alone in your experiences.
QUOTES FROM EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE
"When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can."
"Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women."
"Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall."
"The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever."
"Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I'm bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is- just me and the trees and the sky and the seas- I know now that that's enough."
"More often than not the love that someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself. If you can't treat yourself with kindness, care and patience, chances are someone else won't either."
"It is futile and knackering to try and make all your tiny choices representative of your moral compass then beat yourself up when this plan inevitably fails. Feminists can get waxed. Priests can swear. Vegetarians can wear leather shoes. Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make."
"It was at this time that I was reminded of the chain of support that keeps a sufferer afloat – the person at the core of a crisis needs the support of their family and best friends, while those people need support from their friends, partners and family. Then even those people twice removed might need to talk to someone about it too. It takes a village to mend a broken heart."
"It’s completely OK to focus on yourself. You’re allowed to travel and live on your own and spend all your money on yourself and flirt with whoever you like and be as consumed with your work as you want. You don’t have to get married and you don’t have to have children. It doesn’t make you shallow if you don’t want to open up and share your life with a partner. But it’s also completely not OK to be in a relationship if you know that you want to be on your own."
"But I feel more powerful than ever. And more peaceful too. I am living more truthfully than I’ve ever lived. I may not be the exact portrait of womanhood that my teenage self envisaged (sophisticated and slim; wearing black dresses and drinking martinis and meeting men at book launches and exhibition openings). I may not have all the exact things I thought I’d have at thirty. Or all the things I’ve been told I should have. But I feel content; grateful for every morning that I wake up with another day on this earth and another chance to do good and feel good and make others feel good too."
"Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live. We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end. We marvel at a nectarine sunset over the M25 or the smell of a baby’s head or the efficiency of flat-pack furniture, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it."
"To choose to love is to take a risk."
"To be a desirable woman—the sky’s the limit. Have every surface of your body waxed. Have manicures every week. Wear heels every day. Look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel even though you work in an office. It’s not enough to be an average-sized woman with a bit of hair and an all-right sweater. That doesn’t cut it. We’re told we have to look like the women who are paid to look like that as their profession."
"I was grateful for understanding in that moment that life can really be as simple as just breathing in and out. And I was thankful to know what it was to love the person walking next to me as much as I did. So deeply, so furiously. So impossibly."
"I am always half in life, half in a fantastical version of it in my head."
"To lower your heart rate and drift off on nights when sleep feels impossible, dream of all the adventures that lie ahead of you and the distances you’ve traveled so far. Wrap your arms tightly round your body and, as you hold yourself, hold this one thought in your head: I’ve got you."
"Maybe you just have an unfillable void,’ he said with a gentle sigh. ‘Maybe no man will ever be able to fill it."
"I don’t want the brain of my twenty-one-year-old self. Or the impulses or the bloody . . . inner turmoil. I want everything I have now—I want all the lessons I’ve learned and the experiences I’ve had and to know all the stuff I know. But I want to transpose myself back to the physical state of being twenty-one forever, with all my life ahead of me."
"Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you."
"Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it."
"I hadn't ever thought that a man could love me in the same way that my friends love me; that I could love a man with the same commitment and care with which I love them. Maybe all this time I had been in a great marriage without even realising."
"No one has ever asked you to make a floor-to-ceiling-sized friendship collage for their birthday. Or ring them three times a day. No one will cry if you don’t invite them to dinner because you don’t have enough chairs. If you feel exhausted by people, it’s because you’re willingly playing the martyr to make them like you. It’s your problem, not theirs."
"You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you."
"Rambunctious, restless and ramshackle. Roving, raucous and rebellious. My roaming decade; my roaring twenties."
"I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it."
"I gave almost all of my energy away to other people when no one had asked it of me."
"I know what it is to love someone and accept that you can’t change certain things about them."
"The love I felt was aggressive and fraught—I loved him with panic and passion. I didn't fall in love; love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height."
"No matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you for ever."
"Absolutely everyone is dysfunctional on some level, but a lot of people can function dysfunctionally."
"Being a detective for your past - tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional - can be incredibly useful and freeing."
"Anyone can be fucking fancied. It is a far greater thing to be loved."
"I don't need any words or looks or comments from a man to believe I'm visible; to believe I'm here. don't need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeliner. That's not where I come alive."
"I break myself off into different bits to give to different people, rather than being whole. I’m so restless and unsettled. I don’t know how to be without all the things I use to prop me up."
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