Home > Author > Sara Barnard
1 " I want the world, I think. Even if it scares me. "
― Sara Barnard , A Quiet Kind of Thunder
2 " I decide this is just A Bad Day. We all get them, because grief doesn't care how many years it's been. "
3 " And then it happens. The panic. It's slow at first, creeping through the cracks in my thoughts until everything starts to feel heavy. It builds; it becomes something physical that clutches at my insides and squeezes out the air and the blood. "
4 " Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day. "
5 " Here are three separate but similar things: shyness, introversion and social anxiety. You can have one, two or all three of these things simultaneously. A lot of the time people thing they're all the same thing, but that's just not true. Extroverts can be shy, introverts can be bold, and a condition like anxiety can strike whatever kind of social animal you are. Lots of people are shy. Shy is normal. A bit of anxiety is normal. Throw the two together, add some brain-signal error - a NO ENTRY sign on the neural highway from my brain to my mouth perhaps, though no one really knows - and you have me. "
6 " I was sixteen, and I honestly believed I was due a love story. "
― Sara Barnard , Beautiful Broken Things (Beautiful Broken Things, #1)
7 " When I’d heard ‘abuse’, I’d thought of violence as being something simple... I hadn’t even considered the framework that allowed it to happen in the first place. The blind eyes turned, the excuses made, the insidious lies whispered into the ear of a child so desperate for love they mistook a gentle tone for truth. "
8 " I’m just saying that sadness isn’t beautiful. And if it looks that way, it’s a lie. "
9 " I wondered, for the first time, what it must have been like to leave them all behind and start over. To trust the strangers you met with the weight of the second chance you’s been given. "
10 " Maybe disappointment does lie in the gulf between what you would do for someone and what they will do for you, but she knows then, in that moment, as she's looking out of the rain-speckled window at the black, black sky, that she needs to stop focusing on what she's willing to do for other people and start focusing on what she's willing to do for herself. "
― Sara Barnard , Floored
11 " But people we love come and go, Caddy. That doesn’t mean we loved them any less at the time. "
12 " Little victories are everything in a world where worst-case scenarios are on an endless loop in your head. "
13 " Everyone says apologizing works, but it never really does. Not quickly enough anyway. "
14 " Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes "
15 " There is no enough.’ Tarin flicked her indicator on, the clicking noise filling the car as she merged on to the motorway. ‘You seem to be forgetting that she’s in a clinical facility getting professional help. Which is great, obviously. Let them worry about how to deal with depression. You’re going to visit your friend, remember? Yes, she’s a patient, but she’s not your patient. So for God’s sake, don’t treat her like one. "
16 " Doesn’t she know? Doesn’t she get it? That in anxious heads like mine all it takes is a few words to bring a careful foundation tumbling down? "
17 " Sometimes it just takes that one person to see beyond what everyone tells them they're meant to see. "
― Sara Barnard , Goodbye, Perfect
18 " Someone like you is brilliant and amazing,' I said. 'Why can't you see that in yourself?' The unfairness of it was starting to sink in. If she could only see herself like I did, there wouldn't be a problem. But she didn't, and she never would, and that was so many levels of wrong and unfair I almost couldn't comprehend it. "
19 " Even when you see it coming, there's no avoiding the inevitable. "
20 " People talk about friendship like it's only about shared loves, but it's not. It's also about finding the same things annoying and getting excited about the same silly, irrelevant things. It's the person you can share a joke with, sure. But it's also the person you can subtly roll your eyes at when someone else is talking too loudly. The person who makes the fun things better and the boring things more bearable. That's Bonnie for me. "
