Beautiful Lies Quotes

“When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That's why you can't fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that's why, when you really connect with a person's inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“I can get my head turned by a good-looking guy as much as the next girl. But sexy doesn't impress me. Smart impresses me, strength of character impresses me. But most of all, I am impressed by kindness. Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks. When I see that in someone, it fills me with admiration.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“The Universe doesn't like secrets. It conspires to reveal the truth, to lead you to it.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“When you love someone, it doesn't really matter if they love you back or not. Having love in your heart for someone is its own reward. or punishment, depending on the circumstances.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“We may say we're looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren't we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood? - Ridley Jones”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“How many people can you claim truly care about you? I mean, not just the people in your life who are fun to hang out with, not just the people who you love and trust. But people who feel good when you are happy and successful, feel bad when you are hurt or going through a hard time, people who would walk away from their lives for a little while to help you with yours. Not many. I felt that from Jake and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Because there’s another side to it, you know. When someone is invested in your well-being, like your parents, for example, you become responsible for them in a way. Anything you do to hurt yourself hurts them. I already felt responsible for too many people that way. You’re not really free when people care about you; not if you care about them.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“In the end, I cared about him so much that I just thought he deserved someone who loved him more than I did.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“It's a little known fact, but parents are like superheroes. With just a few magic words they can make you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, they can slay the dragons of doubt and worry, they can make your problems disappear. But of course they can only do this as long as you're a child. When you've become an adult, become the master of your own universe, they're not as powerful as they once were. Maybe that's why so many of us take our time growing up.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“...in the end it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them-that's where you have control over your life.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I hadn't taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It's hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“We can’t hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“I didn’t see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone’s life.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it?”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They’re charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has stolen or worn away.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful about him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he’d paid an obscene sum and never wore.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“But in the end, it’s not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it’s how you choose to react to them. That’s where you have control over your life.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“...little girls are raised on fairy tales. No one ever tells you that sad things stay sad, some people die angry and unforgiven, and some things are lost and never found.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. You can try, but you do all the bleeding.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“It’s all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn’t have this story to tell you. I wouldn’t be the same person telling it.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“When I look back on my life, I marvel at how it hasn’t been the major decisions that have most impacted its course. It’s been the tiny, seemingly inconsequential ones. Think about it. Think about the sudden events that have affected your life. With most of them, wasn’t it just a matter of seconds one way or the other? Wasn’t it the little decisions that caused you to cross this street or that, to move yourself into or out of harm’s way? These are the things that get you in the end. Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised—yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil’s in the details. Well,”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself. If the last few months have taught me anything, it’s this: We don’t have control, we have choices. The little ones, the big ones, these are the points on which our lives pitch and pivot. All we can do is make the best choices we can with what we know, and hope that things turn out the way we want.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“Totally different outcomes; we’ve made totally different choices in our lives. Like I said, how you were raised is part of the big picture. It’s one important factor in a million. But in the end, it’s not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it’s how you choose to react to them.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies

“I don't believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, then I'll bet that you're not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street...or didn't. But you don't know; you can't possibly know.”
― Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies