Ella Berman > Quotes

“I think about another type of revenge -the quieter, less explosive kind I could inflict just by living my life in spite of him.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“I know all about the power imbalance that exists every time you meet someone who's seen you at yourmost vulnerable, whether or not it was your choice in the first place. How you have to hope that they don't use it against you in some way.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“Sometimes your entire fucking life catches on fire for no reason other than to remind you of how fragile it all is. How little control we have over any of it.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“I felt a vague disappointment, as if I'd worked myself up for a battle that wasn't worth it in the end.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“We sounded frivolous at best, mercenary at worst, and maybe we were. But show me an eighteen-year-old saint, and I'll show you a liar.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“I had learned how fragile it all was—that my entire life could be reduced to something smaller than a matchbox in the blink of an eye”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“I know that somebody hurt you. Now it's time for you to fuck shit up, baby lion.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“Sometimes we forget that we can never really know someone else,you know, all of them. And that's okay, we're all allowed our secrets, but it does mean that ocassionally we mistake our own perspective, our own narrative, for theirs.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“People only want to hear the truth if it also happens to be what they want to hear.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“we’re back to the land of the before: the place unmarred by regret or death or penance, the place where our immature jokes could be forgotten the second they left our mouths and we leapt down steps and careened around corners without dreading what was ahead because we were free to be as weightless and shameful and alive as we wanted, without thinking for a second that we would ever have to temper it, or that any of it would catch up with us in a million years.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“For a while now, I've had this 90-minute rule, I never spend longer that than 90 minutes in someone else's company (...) I think that it's easy to pretend to be someone for 90 minutes, but after that you can't help but let your guard down.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“We were always living different versions of the same story.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“Everything feels like it's the end of the world until you're actually faced with the end of the world.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“The most vicious demons have always been my own, and I’ve never learned how to protect myself from them. I have tried moving quietly through the world, figuring that if I could just forget what happened, then I could move on, but maybe it doesn’t work like that. Maybe it’s never been that simple.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“We sounded frivolous at best, mercenary at worst, and maybe we were. But show me an eighteen-year-old saint, and I’ll show you a liar.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“It’s the kind of place where your hardest decisions become clear as water, and you realize that not only do you know exactly what you need to be doing, but you had the answer all along.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“Underneath all her teenage cynicism, I can tell that she still believes in the good guys and the bad guys, in retribution and happy endings, and I envy her for it.”
― Ella Berman

“I can almost remember what it was like to know I was happy at the exact moment I felt it, as opposed to only after the moment has passed.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“I don’t think any of us know what someone else is truly capable of,” Theo says. “Even when we love them. That’s part of the thrill of being alive.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“Remember that you aren’t accountable to anyone except for yourself. You need to keep your head down and focus on your own recovery. Fuck everyone else.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“There are an infinite number of things that are better than knowing exactly when you’re falling short of someone’s expectations and still being unable to stop it.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“I understand that sometimes the worst part of it all is that you lose control of your own story.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“Sometimes we could be cruel for sport, yes, but most of the time we hurt each other to hide our own gaping wounds. To find out not just if we were enough for each other but if we would ever be enough for anyone.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“In the first class of every academic year, he would hand out letters sent between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to his high school English students, comparing their notes to teenagers’ texts today as an example of digital communication being the death of intellect, of passion, of nuance, as if any number of acronyms and pizza emojis could ever encapsulate as much emotion as the human language, which has already lasted over a million years, for fuck’s sake. Willa, while still demonstrative in her emoji use with Joni, for example, would never dream of sending Lucien an emoji, let alone one of a black fucking heart.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“It all seemed so fragile to me, the trust we put in others without thinking about it.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“know”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“Maybe Joni was right and life is about being fucking terrified and still showing up and turning yourself inside out because you know that loving someone gives them the power to break you, but that maybe, one day, you might just be lucky enough to stumble across another human who recognizes you exactly as you are and who will spend the rest of their life learning how to strike a match to fill your darkness.”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“I wonder what it would be like to actually know how I feel about something before I’ve already lost it.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback

“You were so scared we were going to fracture that you broke us first,”
― Ella Berman, Before We Were Innocent

“It’s funny how easy it is to become a creature of habit, even when those habits are not your own.”
― Ella Berman, The Comeback