Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

Most people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism.

In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I think that people have expectations of themselves and other people that are based on these fictions that are presented to them as the way human life and relationships could be, in some sort of weird, ideal world, but they never are. So you're constantly being shown this garbage and you can't get there.

We live in this world of great promise, where everything seems to offer an unchanging final happiness, if we can only get enough of it. It is very intoxicating.

There's a million leading men on TV today that are perfectly great, and their jobs are fantastic. But it's not as interesting to me when every fight they win, every case they solve, every girl they get.

Unfortunately, kids are led to believe things are easier to achieve than they really are.

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.

The concept of the 'good ol' days' must be one of our society's biggest delusions, top reasons for depression, as well as most often used excuse for lack of success.

Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.

Nothing lives up to what you imagine. It changes, shifts, becomes something else.

Nothing that you want ever is what you think it is.

Sometimes that light at the end of the tunnel is a train.

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it the light of the oncoming train.

People always want change .... Government always raises expectations far beyond what is there.

What Western society teaches us is that if you get enough money, power, and beautiful people to have sex with, that's going to bring you happiness. That's what every commercial, every magazine, music, movie teaches us. That's a fallacy.

Things aren't always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

We have this idealized romanticism about how love might solve all of our problems, but then it doesn't.

The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.

A lot of times you can fall into the trap of expecting too much before things actually happen.

Men mess up. Women create this big illusion in their head that the man they're going to be with is going to be perfect. Nobody's going to be perfect, and people are going to let you down. The only thing that you can hope for is someone that's going to be honest with you.

That Happily Ever After is a great way to tell stories when you're young but eventually it loses its meaning because it's just not true.

It was total naivety that got me to Hollywood. I thought it was going to happen straight away. I told myself 'give it 5 years, there's no way I'll be here after that if it doesn't happen'. Cut to ten years later!

I fear that the public at home expect too prompt results.

You can promise anything in this world because it isn't a real world. We don't have to balance the budget.