Quotes from book

Nineteen Minutes

“She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.”

“Lie to yourself until it's true.”

“There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.”

“Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.”

“When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.”

“eskimos maybe? believed stars were holes in the sky where people who died could peek through at you”

“There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.”

“A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations. There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.”

“He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that
doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.”

“If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.”

“You can’t undo something that’s happened; you can’t take back a word that’s already been said out loud.”

“You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?”

“Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.”

“What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.”

“What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.”

“Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.”

“Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?”