Reid Quotes

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.

I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of fucking story.

Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.

Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.

Don't ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box. Don't do that.

I’m under absolutely no obligation to make sense to you.

You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until somewhat stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.

Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

Heartbreak is a loss. Divorce is a piece of paper.

I spent half my time loving her and the other half hiding how much I loved her.

Please never forget that the sun rises and sets with your smile. At least to me it does. You’re the only thing on this planet worth worshipping.

It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.

When you're given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. The world doesn't give things, you take things.

Make them pay you what they would pay a white man.

I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it's not faith, right?

You can be sorry about something and not regret it,” Evelyn says.

Passion is...it's fire. And fire is great, man. But we're made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive.

It’s like some of us are chasing after our nightmares the way other people chase dreams.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation." [As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Be wary of men with something to prove.

You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small.

I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was like me. I don't believe in soul mates anymore and I'm not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I'd believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn't, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who's suffering from the same stuff you are.

If she knew how often I was thinking about her, she wouldn't feel lonely.

All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.

You wonder what it must be like to be a man, to be so confident that the final say is yours.

...do yourself a favor and learn to grab life by the balls, dear. Don’t be so tied up in trying to do the right thing when the smart thing is so painfully clear.

I am not going to sit around sweating my ass off just so men can feel more comfortable. It’s not my responsibility to not turn them on. It’s their responsibility to not be an asshole.

No matter who you choose to go down the road with, you're gonna get hurt. That's just the nature of caring about someone. No matter who you love, they will break your heart along the way.

I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices and they led me somewhere else, led me to someone else. And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn't end up with you.

But if you have to go, then go. Go if it hurts. Go if it's time. Just go knowing you were loved, that I will never forget you, that you will live in everything Connor and I do. Go knowing I love you purely, Harry, that you were an amazing father. Go knowing I told you all my secrets. Because you were my best friend.

You have to have one person in your life that you know would never do anything to steer you wrong. They may disagree with you. They could even break your heart, from time to time. But you have to have one person, at least, who you know will always tell you the truth.

When you think of me, I hope it ruins rock 'n' roll

I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to… I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace.

People are messy, and love can be ugly. I’m inclined to always err on the side of compassion.

No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they’re also painfully unoriginal.

It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.

Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

She always made sure the bad was outweighed by so much good. I...well, I didn't do that for her. I made it fifty-fifty. Which is about the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love, give them just enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad.

Nina understood, maybe for the first time, that letting people love you and care for you is part of how you love and care for them.

You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.

How were you supposed to change- in ways both big and small- when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?

You're all sorts of things you don't even know yet.

We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.

Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought.

And it will be the tragedy of my life that I cannot love you enough to make you mine. That you cannot be loved enough to be anyone’s.

Axel Reid, you wake up right now!” I yell. “Get your paws off my tit and call your dick off its search for my pussy, he found it asshole, now back off.

We love broken, beautiful people. And it doesn't get much more obviously broken and more classically beautiful than Daisy Jones.

I'm bisexual. Don't ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box.

Just because something isn’t meant to last a lifetime doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be.

Evelyn looks at me with purpose. "Do you understand what I'm telling you? When you're given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. The world doesn't give things, you take things. If you learn one thing from me, it should probably be that.

Say to them, “Evelyn Hugo just wants to go home. It’s time for her to go to her daughter, and her lover, and her best friend, and her mother.” Tell them Evelyn Hugo says good-bye.

you can’t tell a single thing about a person’s true character if you both want the same thing. That’s like a dog and a cat getting along because they both want to kill the mouse.

That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.

It hurts to care about someone more than they care about themselves.

She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn't have. I wouldn't have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.

Family is found...whether it be blood or circumstance or choice, what binds us does not matter. All that matters is that we are bound.

Why have I spent so long settling for less when I know damn well the world expects more?

If I want things to change, I have to change how I do things. And probably drastically.

And just as she was about to leave the mircophone, she said 'And to anyone tempted to kiss the TV tonight, please don't chip your tooth.

Music is never about music. If it was, we'd be writing songs about guitars. But we don't. We write songs about women. Women will crush you, you know? I suppose everybody hurts everybody, but women always seem to get back up, you ever notice that? Women are always still standing.

I love you as much as I'm willing to love anybody.

But loving somebody isn't perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it's a gut punch. That's why it's a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn't deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else's. It's sacred.

Isn’t it nice … once you’ve outgrown the ideas of what life should be and you just enjoy what it is.

No … because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo. And anyways, I think once people know the truth, they will be much more interested in my wife.

I believe you can break me But I'm saved for the one who saved me We only look like young stars Because you can't see old scars

It’s not wrong,” Celia said. “It shouldn’t be wrong, to love you. How can it be wrong?” “It’s not wrong, sweetheart. It’s not,” I said. “They’re wrong.

You don't have to make yourself OK for a good mother; a good mother makes herself OK for you.

You can't control another person. It doesn't matter how much you love them. You can't love someone back to health and you can't hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn't mean they will change their mind.

But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself.

Our family histories are simply stories. They are myths we create about the people who came before us, in order to make sense of ourselves.

My mother raised me to be polite, to be demure. I have long operated under the idea that civility is subservience. But it hasn't gotten me very far, that type of kindness. The world respects people who think they should be running it.

Just because it is in Malibu's nature to burn, so was it in one particular person's nature to set fire and walk away.

And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.

Must be nice. To be able to be weak. I wouldn’t know.

Life is long and full of an infinite number of decisions. I have to think that the small ones don’t matter, that I’ll end up where I need to end up no matter what I do.

She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.

Sometimes divorce isn’t an earth-shattering loss. Sometimes it’s just two people waking up out of a fog.

She was a woman, after all. Living in a world created by men. And she had long known that assholes protect their own. They are faithful to no one but surprisingly protective of each other.

I had predicated my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I’d come to realize that extraordinary is everywhere.

Good things don’t wait until you’re ready. Sometimes they come right before, when you’re almost there. And I figured when that happens, you can let them pass by like a bus not meant for you. Or you can get ready. So I got ready.

You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you're getting signs about anything and everything.

Forgiveness is different from absolution.

Some men's childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.

« Quote of the day: “Friendship is like peeing your pants; everyone can see it but only you can feel it».

That’s the part I was stuck in, the part where you accept the apology because it’s easier than addressing the root of the problem,

There’s no room for you in my life anymore. And I don’t owe it to you to make any space.

Passion is...it's fire. And fire is great, man. But we're made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive. My family was my water. I picked water. I'll pick water every time.

I loved you so much that I thought you were the meaning of my life....I thought that people were put on earth to find other people, and I was put here to find you. To find you and touch your skin and smell your breath and hear all your thoughts. But I don't want to be meant for someone like you.

When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can’t just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too. Better just to stay in the now and focus on what you can do better in the future.

But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that's all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it's more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you'll have to watch.

It is what I have always loved about music. Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words -- the emotions, the stories, the truth -- that you can let flow right out of your mouth. Music can dig, you know? It can take a shovel to your chest and just start digging until you hit something.

Nobody deserves anything,” Evelyn says. “It's simply a matter of who's willing to go and take it for themselves. And you, Monique, are a person who has proven to be willing to go out there and take what you want. So be honest about that. No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they're also painfully unoriginal.

don’t think that true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly. Loving purely. Loving wholly. Maybe, if you’re the kind of person who’s willing to give all of yourself, the kind of person who is willing to love with all of your heart even though you’ve experienced just how much it can hurt . . . maybe you get lots of true loves, then. Maybe that’s the gift you get for being brave.

Do you think I'm a whore?” Harry pulled over to the side of the road and turned to me. “I think you're brilliant. I think you're tough. And I think the word whore is something ignorant people throw around when they have nothing else. … “Isn't it awfully convenient,” Harry added, “that when men make the rules, the one thing that's looked down on the most is the one thing that would bear them the greatest threat? Imagine if every single woman on the planet wanted something in exchange when she gave up her body. You'd all be ruling the place. An armed populace. Only men like me would stand a chance against you. And that's the last thing those assholes want, a world run by people like you and me.” I laughed, my eyes still puffy and tired from crying. “So am I a whore or not?” “Who knows?” he said. “We're all whores, really, in some way or another. At least in Hollywood.” … “But I like you this way. I like you impure and scrappy and formidable. I like the Evelyn Hugo who sees the world for what it is and then goes out there and wrestles what she wants out of it. So, you know, put whatever label you want on it, just don't change. That would be the real tragedy.

It is two A.M., and you are tired. You miss the love of your life. You want to go home. You would rather be with her, in bed, hearing the light buzz of her snoring, watching her sleep, than be here. [...] You imagine a world where the two of you can go out to dinner together on a Saturday night and no one thinks twice about it. It makes you want to cry, the simplicity of it, the smallness of it. You have worked so hard for a life so grand. And now all you want are the smallest freedoms. The daily peace of loving plainly.

The love of my life is gone, and I can't just call her and say I'm sorry and have her come back. She's gone forever. So yes, Monique, that is something I do regret. I regret every second I didn't spend with her. I regret every stupid thing I did that caused her an ounce of pain. I should have chased her down the street the day she left me. I should have begged her to stay. I should have apologized and sent roses and stood on top of the Hollywood sign and shouted, 'I'm in love with Celia St. James!' and let them crucify me for it. That's what I should have done. And now that I don't have her, and I have more money than I could ever use in this lifetime, and my name is cemented in Hollywood history, and I know how hollow it is, I am kicking myself for every single second I chose it over loving her proudly.

If there are all different types of soul mates,” I told Harry one afternoon, when the two of us were sitting out on the patio with Connor, “then you are one of mine.” Harry was wearing a pair of shorts and no shirt. Connor was lying on his chest. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his stubble was coming in. It had just the slightest gray patch under his chin. Looking at him with her, I realized how much they looked alike. Same long lashes, same pert lips. Harry held Connor to his chest with one hand and grabbed my free hand with the other. “I am absolutely positive that I need you more than I’ve ever needed another living soul,” he said. “The only exception being—” “Connor,” I said. We both smiled. For the rest of our lives, we would say that. The only exception to absolutely everything was Connor.

I love you so much, sweetheart. So, so much. And it's in part because of things like that. You're an idealist and a romantic, and you have a beautiful soul. And I wish the world was ready to be the way you see it. I wish that the rest of the people on earth with us were capable of living up to your expectations. But they aren't. The world is ugly, and no one wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt about anything. When we lose our work and our reputations, when we lose our friends and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I've lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever I can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.

I think what I want is for someone to know me. Really know me. Know me better than anyone else and maybe even me. Isn’t that why we commit to another? It’s not for sex. If it were for sex, we wouldn’t marry one person. We’d just keep finding new partners. We commit for many reasons, I know, but the more I think about it, the more I think long-term relationships are for getting to know someone. I want someone to know me, really know me, almost like that person could get into my head. What would that feel like? To have access, to know what it’s like in someone else’s head. To rely on someone else, have him rely on you. That’s not a biological connection like the one between parents and children. This kind of relationship would be chosen. It would be something cooler, harder to achieve than one built on biology and shared genetics. I think that’s it. Maybe that’s how we know when a relationship is real. When someone else previously unconnected to us knows us in a way we never thought or believed possible.

THAT’S HOW MY STORY ENDS. With the loss of everyone I have ever loved. With me, in a big, beautiful Upper East Side apartment, missing everyone who ever meant anything to me. When you write the ending, Monique, make sure it’s clear that I don’t love this apartment, that I don’t care about all my money, that I couldn’t give a rat’s ass if people think I’m a legend, that the adoration of millions of people never warmed my bed. When you write the ending, Monique, tell everyone that it is the people I miss. Tell everyone that I got it wrong. That I chose the wrong things most of the time. When you write the ending, Monique, make sure the reader understands that all I was ever really looking for was family. Make sure it’s clear that I found it. Make sure they know that I am heartbroken without it. Spell it out if you have to. Say that Evelyn Hugo doesn’t care if everyone forgets her name. Evelyn Hugo doesn’t care if everyone forgets she was ever alive. Better yet, remind them that Evelyn Hugo never existed. She was a person I made up for them. So that they would love me. Tell them that I was confused, for a very long time, about what love was. Tell them that I understand it now, and I don’t need their love anymore. Say to them, “Evelyn Hugo just wants to go home. It’s time for her to go to her daughter, and her lover, and her best friend, and her mother.” Tell them Evelyn Hugo says good-bye.