Emily Giffin Quotes

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

I'm not into watching stuff I did last week, let alone three or four years ago.

It's hard to watch something you've done many years ago.

I like to read my diary occasionally to remind myself what a miserable, alienated old sod I used to be.

Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.

I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.

I find going back through things sometimes exhilarating because I find things I didn't know I had, and sometimes it's very off putting because there are things I never quite finished, and there's nothing at all to do about it now.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

I use my film-making to work through my deep questions and my deep problems. I think I could watch each film and tell you exactly which part of my psyche I'm trying to work out.

That song didn't just happen. It grew out of my experiences. 'American Pie' was part of my process of self-awakening: a mystical trip into my past.

To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.

In bed at night, I could be reading some book, and I'll come across a sentence that's totally unrelated to some scene I did years ago. But I'll play the scene back in my mind and think, I did that wrong - I should've opened the door more slowly.

I think you save things from your past that you don't quite understand, and you put them in a box, and you save them for later until you can unwrap them and try to understand what they meant.

I didn't have a horrible life as a teenager but I was certainly depressed and had some pain in my life at that time. I've spent a lot of time thinking back on that time in my life. I think I am just fascinated by it.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger. Maybe we don't all have that dream. I don't know. Getting to role play or step back to a different moment in time and see things through a different lens is something that resonated with me, for sure. We don't get to do that, generally, but when the right neurological disorder lines up with the right unstable woman, that moment presents itself. Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are.

The pain shows you what's left to investigate.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

Man has made remarkable strides in conquering outer space, but how futile have been his efforts in conquering inner space- the space in our hearts and minds of men.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.