Quotes by Marian Keyes

Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.

It was ironic, really - you want to die because you cant be bothered to go on living - but then youre expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops.And if youve managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.

What doesnt kill us makes us funnier.

when happiness makes a guest appearance in ones life,its important to make the most of it.It may not stay around for long and when it has gone wouldnt it be terrible to think that all the time one could have been happy was wasted worrying when the happiness would be taken away.

Devereaux is going with our pitch.”“Hey, that’s just great,” I said superperkily. “Wendell’s or mine?”“Yours.”“But you want to fire me. So fire me.”“We can’t fire you. They loved you. The head guy, Leonard Daly, thought you were, I quote, ‘agreat kid, very courageous’ and a natural to do a whispering campaign. He said you hadbelievability.”“That’s too bad.”“Why? You’re not quitting!”I thought about it. “Not if you don’t want me to. Do you?”Go on, say it.298 ♥elavanilla♥“No.”“No what?”“No, we don’t want you to quit.”“Ten grand more, two assistants, and charcoal suits. Take it or leave it.”Ariella swallowed. “Okay to the money, okay to the assistants, but I can’t green-light charcoalsuits. Formula Twelve is Brazilian, we need carnival colors.”“Charcoal suits or I’m gone.”“Orange.”“Charcoal.”“Orange.”“Charcoal.”“Okay, charcoal.”It was an interesting lesson in power. The only time you truly have it is when you genuinelydon’t care whether you have it or not.“Right,” I said. “I’m giving myself the rest of the day off.

Relationship gurus always said that an attraction based on friendship and mutual respect was far more likely to stay the course - and the bastards were right.

Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted makeup.Forget the laughs, forget the fights, forget the sex, forget the jealousy. But take off your hat and observe a moments silence for the legions of unknown tubes of foundation, mascara, eyeliner, blusher and lipstick who died that it might all have been possible. But who died in vain.

When I opened my case in the hotel, he gestured excitedly at my snakeskin sandals, turquoise suede wedges and silver-speckled jellies. “But you’ve loads of shoes,” he bellowed joyfully. I shook my head sadly. Men just don’t get it, do they? They’re definitely missing the shoe chromosome.

They say the path of true love never runs smooth. Well, Luke and my true loves path didnt run at all, it limped along in new boots that were chafing its heels. Blistered and cut, red and raw, every hopping, lopsided step, a little slice of agony.

The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdins cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look. Claire (Watermelon)

...as you know, I dont believe in fear, just an invention by men so they get all the money and good jobs...

I love Prada. Not so much the clothes, which are for malnourished thirteen-year-olds, but I covet, with covety covetousness, the shoes and handbags. Like, I LOVE them. If I was given a choice between world peace and a Prada handbag, Id dither. (Im not proud of this, Im only saying.)

Honestly, if youre looking for love and youre not too choosy, hang around a hardware store fingering screws.

So Im back again to the eternal question, the one that has plagued me all my life: How Do Other People Do It? How come they were given lifes rule book and I missed out? Where was I when God was dispensing capability and cop on? Looking at shoes, probably.

The back windows looked out over the fields, then the Atlantic, maybe a hundred yards away. Actually, Im just making that bit up. I had no idea how far away the sea was. Only men could do things like that. Half a mile. Fifty yards. Giving directions, that sort of thing. I could look at a woman and say Thirty-six C. Or Lets try it in the next size up. But I had no idea how far away Tims sea was except that I wouldnt want to walk to it in high heels.

If you lose someone, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. Theres a point to the pain. Theres a reason and a direction.

I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.

Two and a half years ago I’d learned to stop wanting comfort from the people around me, because they couldn’t give it. We were all too scared. I was terrified and so were they. No one could understand what was happening to me, and when they couldn’t make me better they felt helpless and guilty and eventually resentful. Yes, they loved me, my head knew that even if my heart couldn’t feel it, but there was a small part of them that was angry. As if it was my choice to become depressed and that I was deliberately resisting the medication that was meant to fix me.

The last time I’d been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps:The Let’s Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, ‘Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I’d have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, ‘What have you got to be depressed about?’The It’s All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn’t kill myself because they’d miss me so much. More often than not, I’d end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, ‘Have you any idea how many people love you?’The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn’t care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, ‘I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?’ Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender.The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. those purveying alternative cures. And actually there were hundreds of them – urging me to do reiki, yoga, homeopathy, bible study, sufi dance, cold showers, meditation, EFT, hypnotherapy, hydrotherapy, silent retreats, sweat lodges, felting, fasting, angel channelling or eating only blue food. Everyone had a story about something that had cured their auntie/boss/boyfriend/next-door neighbour. But my sister Rachel was the worst – she had me plagued. Not a day passed that she didn’t send me a link to some swizzer. Followed by a phone call ten minutes later to make sure I’d made an appointment. (And I was so desperate that I even gave plenty of them a go.) Most likely to say, ‘This man’s a miracle worker.’ Followed by: ‘That’s why he’s so expensive. Miracles don’t come cheap.’There was often cross-pollination between the different groupings. Sometimes the Let’s Laugh It Off merchants teamed up with the Tough Love people to tell me that recovering from depression is ‘simply mind over matter’. You just decide you’re better. (The way you would if you had emphysema.)Or an All About Me would ring a member of the Woo-Woo crew and sob and sob about how selfish I was being and the Woo-Woo crew person would agree because I had refused to cough up two grand for a sweat lodge in Wicklow.Or one of the Runaways would tiptoe back for a sneaky look at me, then commandeer a Denier into launching a two-pronged attack, telling me how well I seemed. And actually that was the worst thing anyone could have done to me, because you can only sound like a self-pitying malingerer if you protest, ‘But I don’t feel well. I feel wretched beyond description.’Not one person who loved me understood how I’d felt. They hadn’t a clue and I didn’t blame them, because, until it had happened to me, I hadn’t a clue either.

People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they dont. And it doesnt matter if the sickness is cancer or if its depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they dont. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop. Sometimes the alternative stuff works and sometimes it doesnt. And sometimes you wonder if no outside interference makes any difference at all; if an illness is like a storm, if it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, depending on how robust you are, you will be alive. Or you will be dead.