Top 300 Alice Feeney Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Books have always made me feel safe, something to hide inside when the real world gets too dark.”

— Alice Feeney

202. “We weave our lives out of threads of opportunity and stitches of chance, nobody wants a future full of holes.”

— Alice Feeney

203. “My dear, I’d rather be dead than normal.”

— Alice Feeney

204. “We spend our youth building sandcastles of ambition, then watch as life blows sands of doubt over our carefully crafted turrets of wishes and dreams, until we can no longer see them at all. We learn to settle instead for flattened lives, residing inside prisons of compromise.”

— Alice Feeney

205. “The ocean continues to serenade my unsettled thoughts, as though trying to silence them with the relentless shh of the sea.”

— Alice Feeney

206. “I’ve always felt safe in bookshops. It’s as though the stories inside them can rescue me from myself and the rest of the world. A literary sanctuary filled with shelves of paper-shaped parachutes, which will save you when you fall.”

— Alice Feeney

207. “The only nobodies in this world are the people who pretend to be somebody; the people who think they are better than other people because of the way they choose to look, or speak, or vote, or pray, or love.”

— Alice Feeney

208. “I do know that the lies we tell ourselves are always the most dangerous. And I know that sometimes the thoughts we hide in the margins of our minds are the most honest, because they are ours alone, and we think nobody else will see them.”

— Alice Feeney

209. “Our thoughts and feelings are there to be expressed and they are our own: unique. I don’t feel the same way as you about the world, and that’s fine. We’re not designed to always think and feel the same. We are not sheep. Agreeing with someone about something is a choice, try to remember that. Don’t waste your life wishing to be like someone else, decide who you are and be you.”

— Alice Feeney

210. “The branches of our family tree all grew in different directions, and it’s best to avoid the stormy subjects that might make them bend or break.”

— Alice Feeney

211. “Complaining is my sister’s not-so-secret superpower. She is a walking frown. The soundtrack of her life is little more than a series of moans stitched together into a symphony of negativity, which I find exhausting to listen to.”

— Alice Feeney

212. “We are all conditioned and fine-tuned to our own unique brand of normal; we wear it like a fingerprint. We’re taught to fit in with others and learn what is expected of us from the moment we are born. Everything we ever do is an act.”

— Alice Feeney

213. “And people can make a hobby out of hate. The more they practice, the better they get.”

— Alice Feeney

214. “All I ever seem to do is disappoint him.”

— Alice Feeney

215. “I wonder if we are all just echoes of the people we might have been if life had unfolded differently. The by-products of a crease in time.”

— Alice Feeney

216. “Don’t spend all of your ambition on other people’s dreams.”

— Alice Feeney

217. “That’s the problem with following in someone else’s footsteps; if you leave a bigger mark than they did they tend to get upset.”

— Alice Feeney

218. “Denial is often a down payment for future heartbreak.”

— Alice Feeney

219. “Nancy was very good at growing most things except for children. We never grew fast enough, or tall enough, or pretty enough, in her opinion. So she planted seeds of fear as well as doubt all around this house and throughout our childhoods, little saplings rising up through the floorboards, creeping in through the cracks, to remind us what a disappointing crop we were.”

— Alice Feeney

220. “You can see fear on the surface of some people, while others learn to hide their worries inside themselves, out of sight but not out of mind.”

— Alice Feeney

221. “Nana taught us that the devil is not a fictional man with a red cape and horns; he’s the voice inside our heads that tells us to do things we shouldn’t; he’s the eyes that pretend not to see, and the ears that pretend not to hear. He’s you, he’s me, he’s all of us.”

— Alice Feeney

222. “Robin read recently that bats give birth to their babies while hanging upside down. Then they have to catch their children before they fall too far, but that part is the same for all parents.”

— Alice Feeney

223. “He is an intellectually promiscuous man who gorges on the thoughts of others, then shares them, dressed up as his own. Secondhand ideas sold as new. He seasons his sentences with the odd long word because he doesn’t want people to hear his lack of knowledge or education. The piano was his first and only true love, and music is the only subject he has ever really studied.”

— Alice Feeney

224. “A good book can be a light in the darkness. A good book can cure loneliness, change minds, or even change the world. A good book is nothing less than magic.”

— Alice Feeney

225. “Every family is a fortress that few outsiders get to see inside. Especially ours. Sometimes people are invited in for a period of time, but they only ever get the public tour; they never really see behind the scenes. A backstage pass is a myth when it comes to human relationships; we can never really know another person because we rarely know ourselves.”

— Alice Feeney

226. “Grief is a patient thief and steals far more than people who have never known it realize.”

— Alice Feeney

227. “Ever since I was a child, I have preferred to inhabit the fictional lives of others, hiding in stories that have happier endings than my own; we are what we read.”

— Alice Feeney

228. “We spend our youth building sandcastles of ambition, then watch as life blows sands of doubt over our carefully crafted turrets of wishes and dreams, until we can no longer see them at all. We learn to settle instead for flattened lives, residing inside prisons of compromise. A little relieved that the windows of the world we settled for are too small to see out of, so we don’t have to stare at the castle-shaped fantasies of who we might have been.”

— Alice Feeney

229. “Mors janua vitae? It’s Latin for ’death is the gate of life.”

— Alice Feeney

230. “Few people are genuinely capable of forgiveness, and nobody ever really forgets.”

— Alice Feeney

231. “I picture myself confined within my clinical cell, time slowly dripping down the four walls, forming puddles of dirty sludge that will slowly come up to drown me. Until then, I am existing in an infinite space where delusion is married to reality.”

— Alice Feeney

232. “They say that your life flashes before your eyes when you die, so you should make it a life worth watching.”

— Alice Feeney

233. “There are two kinds of women: those who spend a lifetime trying not to turn into their mothers, and those who literally seem to want nothing more. I often find both varieties get the complete opposite of what they hoped for – one set become carbon copies of the women they didn’t want to be, while the others never live up to their own expectations of who they think they should have become.”

— Alice Feeney

234. “It’s amazing how a wound so small can refuse to heal and inflict so much discomfort.”

— Alice Feeney

235. “Sometimes we believe what we want to about the people we like the most.”

— Alice Feeney

236. “The scariest haunted houses are always the ones in which you are the ghost.”

— Alice Feeney

237. “You’re always a better husband when we have an audience.”

— Alice Feeney

238. “I was taught to be polite – you cant cross a bridge if you burn it.”

— Alice Feeney

239. “We’re all dying from the day we are born, it is only a matter of time.”

— Alice Feeney

240. “If you spend your present focusing on your past you will never change your future.”

— Alice Feeney

241. “It made me wonder how many firsts a person can have before life only offers them seconds.”

— Alice Feeney

242. “She was the only one who ever really believed in me, and I don’t know how to exist without her.”

— Alice Feeney

243. “People who throw stones don’t seem to understand that they sometimes bounce back.”

— Alice Feeney

244. “We live in a world filled with hate and hurt, these are dark times, but there is still love and light if you look for it.”

— Alice Feeney

245. “I thought you might need this,′ I say, disappointed with the simplicity of words given how long it took me to find them.”

— Alice Feeney

246. “Sometimes it feels like I am lying at the bottom of a murky pond, the weight of the dirty liquid pushing down on me, filling me up with secrets and filth. There are moments when I think it would be a relief to drown, for it all to be over. Nobody can see me down here, but then I was always rather invisible. The new world around me turns in slow motion just out of reach, while I remain perfectly still, down in the darkness.”

— Alice Feeney

247. “I am free of his judgement now, and have realised the only person who forced me to live in his shadow was me. I could have stepped out any time I wanted if I hadn’t been so afraid.”

— Alice Feeney

248. “Life is all about choices, and learning how to put ourselves back together when we fall apart.”

— Alice Feeney

249. “Fear can make something beautiful appear ugly.”

— Alice Feeney

250. “I think most murder mysteries are overrated,” Nana says. “There are much cleverer ways to end a person than killing them.”

— Alice Feeney