Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Isola doesn't approve of small talk and believes in breaking the ice by stomping on it.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us.”
― Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot. ”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“You have listened to fears, Child,' said Aslan. 'Come, let me breathe on you. Forget them. Are you brave again?”
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

“If music stops, and art ceases, and beauty fades, what have we then?”
― Julie Berry, Lovely War

“Old Gin always says if there are troubles on the ground, then look up. The changing sky reminds us that our troubles are not here to stay.”
― Stacey Lee, The Downstairs Girl

“We are in the twilight years of a long love affair, and it has recently occurred to me that a day will come when one of us buries the other. But, I remind myself, that is the happy ending to a story like ours. It is a vow made and kept. Till death do us part. It is the only acceptable outcome to a long and happy marriage, and I am determined not to fear that day, whenever it arrives. I am equally determined to soak up all the days between.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“We repeat what we don’t repair,”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“She'd learned that the beginning of one's life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

“Hurry and love are incompatible. All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry—late for an appointment, behind on my unrealistic to-do list, trying to cram too much into my day. I ooze anger, tension, a critical nagging—the antitheses of love. If you don’t believe me, next time you’re trying to get your type B wife and three young, easily distracted children out of the house and you’re running late (a subject on which I have a wealth of experience), just pay attention to how you relate to them. Does it look and feel like love? Or is it far more in the vein of agitation, anger, a biting comment, a rough glare? Hurry and love are oil and water: they simply do not mix.”
― John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World

“suppose it boils down to some sort of deeply held thing, possibly from childhood—a platinum conviction—that the capacity to conceive children, to receive them into my arms, to take them home, to dwell with them in love, to sacrifice for them as they grow, and to delight in them as the Lord delights in us, that that thing, call it motherhood, call it childbearing, that that thing is the most worthwhile thing in the world—the most perfect thing I am capable of doing.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

“Most basically, the women in my sample went on to have more children because the value of doing so exceeded the value of not doing so. They ranked the next child more highly than the other things they could do with their time and resources. They embraced a scale of values in which something of tremendous worth was attached to having a child; that something was the kind of thing typically reckoned worth dying for: love for a beloved, love of God, love of eternal life, and the pursuit of happiness. No wonder, then, that women reported their losses as the dying of other goods that were truly good. The American women quietly defying the birth dearth had incentives big enough to die for.”
― Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth