Patty > Patty's Quotes

“Here's the thing: the act of reading changes your life, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small ways, but every book you read asks you to move outside of yourself and your own experience to consider the lives of others. So I can't identify a particular book that altered my life, but I do know that the act of reading has pushed me to engage more deeply with the world (real and imagined), and I'm grateful for that.”
― Ethan Rutherford

“Then, to their surprise, they found before them a high wall which seemed to be made of white china. It was smooth, like the surface of a dish, and higher than their heads.”
― L. Frank Baum, Oz: The Complete Collection

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“She believed, of course ... because without something to believe in, life would be intolerable.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, The Shell Seekers

“The only balm to sorrow is memory; the only salve for the pain of losing someone to death is acknowledging the life that existed before.”
― Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.”
― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace

“I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
― Benjamin Spock

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.”
― John F. Kennedy

“As it turned out, nearly everything strange and disquieting about Trump – his punitive response to even mile criticism, his viscerally personal insults disguised as ‘jokes,’ his willingness to spread wild rumors about his targets in order to discredit or shame them, his inability to stop lashing out or degrading certain women years after they’d left his life – was also a commonly reported behavior of domestic abusers.
Sady Doyle, “The Pathology of Donald Trump”
― Sady Doyle, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on YOU to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
Bernadette”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“You are a scoundrel," she whispered furiously.

"Yes," he agreed. "I'm thinking of starting a Society of Gentlemen Scoundrels."

"You're millennia too late. It already exists and is called the patriarchy.”
― India Holton, The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels