Eileen > Eileen's Quotes

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“[W]e would never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape, or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“However, one Sunday in December, when the rosebushes on the tombs had already defeated the garden shears, he saw the swallows on the recently installed electric wires and he suddenly realized how much time had gone by since the death of his mother, and how much since the murder of Olimpia Zuleta, and how very much since that other distant December afternoon when Fermina Daza sent him a letter saying yes, she would love him always. Until then he had behaved as if time would not pass for him but only for others.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“In every country where independence takes the place of liberty, the first need felt by any strong mind and powerful constitution is to possess a weapon which can serve both for attack and defence; and which, by making its bearer formidable, will mean that he often inspires dread.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“In the first half of the 60s, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson started moving the nation toward social justice, passing civil rights laws in opposition to the well-known racism of the Dixiecrats. That bunch got mighty irascible. The idea that they might have to abandon their racism, parochialism, anti-federalism, and ignorant religion to continue living in a nation of decent people just got their blood a’boilin’.”
― Scott McMurrey, Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of Scum America

“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“As his father made painfully clear that night, to deface the pages of a book was to adopt the manner of a Visigoth. It was to strike a blow against that most sacred and noble of man’s achievements—the ability to set down his finest ideas and sentiments so that they might be shared through the ages.”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“Never in America’s history, though—however many sideburns Bowery barbers shaved or immigrants came ashore—had a losing presidential candidate argued that the whole nation had been swindled. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, his victory so outraged his opposition that an entire region of the country broke away. But in loss Stephen A. Douglas never claimed the election was “rigged.”
― Mark Bowden, The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It

“Most of the time, I’m kind of numb,” she replied. “You know, I think every mom out there can relate to the fact of how long it takes to create a baby, those nine months that you watch every ultrasound and every heartbeat. And it takes nine months to create a human being, and it takes seconds for an AR-15 to take that away from the surface of this Earth. And it wasn’t just my son. It was 25 other souls that left this Earth that day because that weapon fell into the hands of a tormented soul. And that haunts me.”
― Elizabeth Williamson, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

“Lincoln replied, “Yes, I have; and I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“the party endorsed the “speedy construction” of the transcontinental railroad and a “liberal and just” policy of immigration given that “foreign immigration…has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Knowing how to love life is a necessity, Takeshi, and she needs to learn to trust people. Not to hate them, there’s no way out of hate.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

“It may be laid down as an axiom, that whenever a political party forecloses discussion on any subject, but more especially on a great moral issue, it is not only on the wrong side of that issue, but has an intuitive perception of that fact.”
― Thomas Mealey Harris, Assassination of Lincoln: a History of the Great Conspiracy

“say: “Removing the right to have rights is a new low. Washing our hands of potential terrorists is dangerously shortsighted and statelessness is a tool of despots not democrats.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire