J. Courtney Sullivan Quotes & Sayings

In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become. — J. Courtney Sullivan

The outside pressure to be married was intense. This had surprised her a decade ago, but now she thought she understood. People wanted you to validate their choices by doing the same thing they had done. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I know a lot of women who embody what it means to be a feminist but do not want to use that word. The misperceptions about what it's all about have gotten into their heads. — J. Courtney Sullivan

How could a person have and do all these stupid things
clip coupons and double lock the front door
and then one day just cease to exist? — J. Courtney Sullivan

We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway. — J. Courtney Sullivan

And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Some women were created to make other women feel like shit about themselves. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Life was messy, conflict inevitable. It didn't mean you had to fall apart. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Men made mistakes and when they asked forgiveness, women forgave. It happened every day. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind. — J. Courtney Sullivan

This was the dream: to have a house of your own, to fill it with furniture and paint the shutters whatever color you chose. But a fine-looking house could conceal so many horrors. It seemed they spent half their lives just trying to hold it together. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Well, Chrissy, I'm afraid your grandmother's Irish Alzheimer's has gotten quite advanced - she's forgotten everything but her grudges. — J. Courtney Sullivan

What would you have today if you woke up with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?" He wondered — J. Courtney Sullivan

No one can ever know the inner parts of anyone else's marriage. It's a strange business. — J. Courtney Sullivan

A kid thinks her mother is just that
hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Maggie wondered if in some ways all the complaining only made matters worse. — J. Courtney Sullivan

You want your kids to do better than you did," he said. "That's what the American Dream is all about. But it's hard when they outgrow you. It hurts like hell. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I love making lists. — J. Courtney Sullivan

April's just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia's more like a twenty-gallon tank — J. Courtney Sullivan

All of it remained, a constant reminder: He existed, then he didn't. The world spins on, indifferent to the mess. — J. Courtney Sullivan

If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived. — J. Courtney Sullivan

A glimpse at my night stand gives the mostly true impression that I am a book hoarder. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I love the smell of a man's skin. — J. Courtney Sullivan

With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Timing was everything when it came to being a woman - the moment you entered the world could seal your fate. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I think we're just different sorts of people, me and you. You're a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you're afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it's more like, We're having a baby. Now what? — J. Courtney Sullivan

I sometimes read on the subway, but I'm a hopeless eavesdropper and get easily distracted by strangers' conversations. — J. Courtney Sullivan

The dogs were partly responsible for keeping her sane. The relationship she had with them was pure joy. No ulterior motives, no spite, just love and care and kindness, exactly the emotions she wanted to cultivate. — J. Courtney Sullivan

He also believed that loyalty was earned - sharing a bloodline didn't mean you had to be close. — J. Courtney Sullivan

And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn't happen. That was just the way life went. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Beyond those was a stretch of sand and miles of dark blue sea. You couldn't make out a thing on the other side. As a little girl, Maggie believed that the world dropped off out there, that if you swam far enough you might fall into a starry sky. — J. Courtney Sullivan

She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all. — J. Courtney Sullivan

When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she'd give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Kids are amazing. The first few months, they're just like these loaves of bread that shit. You're wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen. — J. Courtney Sullivan

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga. — J. Courtney Sullivan

There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old. — J. Courtney Sullivan

The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Sometimes April worried that she'd been built without some fundamental piece that everyone else had that just let them deal. Even her mother, who got involved in every lefty cause she could, seemed to be able to shake it all off at the end of the day and enjoy life. But the evil in the world, everywhere you looked, was always on April's mind. — J. Courtney Sullivan

This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn't hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking. — J. Courtney Sullivan

These fucking women really piss me off,' April said. 'Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business
you have to dig out a little place that's only yours. — J. Courtney Sullivan

It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Her mother ... told Kate that after women got out of lousy marriages, they generally had the good sense to stay away from the institution altogether. While men just kept trying to get it right because they were incapable of being alone. — J. Courtney Sullivan

for everything that was wrong with men. — J. Courtney Sullivan

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets. — J. Courtney Sullivan

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear. — J. Courtney Sullivan

You all seem to think you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on. — J. Courtney Sullivan

You could sell crack on the street and go to jail for decades. Or you could sell a woman, and be back out by morning. — J. Courtney Sullivan

She often wondered what the hell was wrong with men. Sex could be fun, natural, good. Why did they have to corrupt it? Why did so many of them prefer to have sex with a victim or a child rather than a willing partner? For that matter, why was it better to have sex with a stranger than with your own wife? — J. Courtney Sullivan

For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Bree knew this habit of hers rankled Lara more than any other
her ability to make a decision and announce that there would be no further discussion was, in Lara's opinion, 'Cruel and selfish behavior, the type usually enacted by men with small penises. — J. Courtney Sullivan

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Even if there was no God there was always the ocean- before you and after you, breathing in and out for all eternity. — J. Courtney Sullivan