Home > Author > Janelle Brown
1 " Smarts mean a lot in the world, but good looks even more. "
― Janelle Brown , Pretty Things
2 " It's easiest to judge from distance. That's why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws weren't as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to preach, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope. "
3 " Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found when you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things. "
4 " When you're documenting everything you do, you stop living life for yourself and start living it as a performance for others. You're never in the actual moment, just the response to the moment. "
5 " Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it until the beast takes over and you are left outside the frame, just looking at images of this creature, like everyone else in your feed, wondering what it is that you birthed and why it's living the life you wish you had. "
6 " Perspective is, by nature, subjective. It's impossible to climb inside someone else's head, despite your best-or worst-intentions. "
7 " Maybe when you're young, you love people as much for their potential as for who they are right now. And if that's the case, what happens to love when time passes and that potential starts to shrivel and fade? Does love die with it? "
― Janelle Brown , This Is Where We Live
8 " Real life is just a never-ending string of compromises that you make in order to survive "
9 " Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are. "
― Janelle Brown , Watch Me Disappear
10 " All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism. "
11 " This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you. "
12 " On social media it's all or nothing: lavish praise or appalled outrage; sycophants or trolls. Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found. "
13 " Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. "
14 " But I suppose that's the point of it all, for Vanessa: To throw herself into the world she wants to inhibit in the hopes of forgetting the one in which she really lives. Who am I to say she's wrong to try? We all build our own delusions and then live inside them, constructing walls to conveniently hide the things we don't want to see. Maybe it means that we're crazy, or maybe it means that we're monsters, or maybe it's just the world we live in now makes it so hard to separate truth from image from dream. "
15 " Maybe our greatest strength as human beings is also our greatest weakness, the need to love and be loved. "
16 " You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life. To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return. "
17 " Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are. "
18 " Was it any wonder that people on the wrong side of the glass would eventually decide to take a hammer and break it, reach through and take some of it for themselves? "
19 " I inherited the very best circumstances if all. And yet, circumstances can change. The natural trajectory of your life can be utterly disrupted by one unexpected encounter, setting you so wildly off course that you're not quite sure if you'll ever find your way back to the path you were on. "
20 " In the end, we are all our mothers’ children, no matter how saintly or evil they might be; and the loss of their love is the earthquake that cracks your foundation forever. It’s permanent damage. "
