Carolyn Jourdan > Carolyn's Quotes

“As with most things, my approach to writing has been entirely ass-backwards. I first had to become everything but a writer -- exhaust all possibilities. I had to come to it on my knees. Only when there was truly nothing left, was I able to become a writer.”
― Quentin R. Bufogle

“The entire health care system is now being organized around machines instead of human beings. Not prioritized to reduce human suffering, but rather to optimize a computerized recordkeeping system. This is a tragedy.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Medicine Men: Extreme Appalachian Doctoring

“A friend complained that his brother-in-law had phoned and woken him up in the middle of the night. The brother-in-law said, “I like to drink a few beers every night. Do you think I’ve got a problem?” My friend said, “Well, I like to eat green beans every day, but I don’t go callin people up at midnight to ask them if they think that means I’ve got a problem! So whadda you think?”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Medicine Men: Extreme Appalachian Doctoring

“There iddn’t no devil,” Nerve said. “Not really. At least not on the outside of us. He’s in us. Just like the Lord Himself can’t work ‘cept through our hands, neither can the devil.” 

”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Out on a Limb: A Smoky Mountain Mystery

“The simplest truth is that we’re all killing ourselves with our temperament. A person will tend toward being bossy, or high-strung, or depressed, or listless. And this has predictable physical consequences. If we don’t learn to become aware of our moods and take steps to moderate them, we’ll eventually die from our habits. This is where heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune problems come from.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Out on a Limb: A Smoky Mountain Mystery

“Spikenard was the essential oil that Mary Magdalene poured over Jesus’s head in the incident that set Judas off.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Out on a Limb: A Smoky Mountain Mystery

“Life could be such an adventure if you could just manage to stay optimistic.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Out on a Limb: A Smoky Mountain Mystery

“This one thing, wait with me, was all Christ had asked the disciples to do for Him the night before He died, but even the best men in the whole world had let Him down. Of course they’d all been men. The women around Him never let Him down. The women were always first in and last out, and seemed to have the only understanding of what was going on at all the crucial moments, but precious few bible scholars ever seemed to notice that.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Out on a Limb: A Smoky Mountain Mystery

“The technical term for a gang of skunks is a surfeit.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Bear in the Back Seat I: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

“It’s a rare type of synchronous firefly that lives in a few places around the world. Scientists from Tennessee used to travel to Asia to study them until they realized we had them right here! Nowadays in June, tens of thousands of people come from all over the world to see the show.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Bear in the Back Seat I: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

“They aren’t native to the area. These wild pigs are a cross between free-ranging domestic hogs and massive, wary Russian wild boars imported by a wealthy businessman for his private hunting lodge on Hoopers Bald, North Carolina in 1912.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Bear in the Back Seat I: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

“…an area so biologically diverse that it was designated as a world environmental treasure by the United Nations.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Bear in the Back Seat I: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

“To be a full-blooded hillbilly was to be a living koan. Half of you wanted to be dignified and half of you couldn’t tolerate any restraint. You could see it in the regional art and hear it in the music. Wood carving with chainsaws. Cloggers who danced up a storm with the lower half of their bodies, but held the upper half perfectly still and stared off into the distance stone-faced. Or a group of bluegrass musicians who’d be playing the most raucous tunes imaginable, looking around at each other with bemused expressions that seemed to say where’s all that racket comin from?

Phoebe believed that nearly all the adult males everywhere were pretty much the same way. Most of them could manage to keep the top half of themselves under a semblance of control, but the bottom half tended to run wild. As she continued to descend the trail she couldn’t help but think that most men were mentally ill below the waist.”
― Carolyn Jourdan, Out on a Limb: A Smoky Mountain Mystery

“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
― Tim O'Brien

“I survived, but it's not a happy ending.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Show some fucking adaptability!”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

“The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.”
― Ellis Peters, Brother Cadfael's Penance