Sue > Sue's Quotes

“If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
― James Baldwin

“Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.”
― Pema Chödrön

“Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.”
― Junot Díaz

“The biggest mistake any of us can make is thinking that love is a feeling, an emotion. It's not that at all. It's an action.”
― Luanne Rice, Follow the Stars Home

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
― Toni Morrison

“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.”
― Questlove, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

“If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.”
― Doris Lessing, On Cats

“A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.”
― Doris Lessing

“Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. ”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“I think sometimes I think too damn much. I worry about this and that and everything else and then I wake up and four more years have slipped right out the back door.”
― Kris Radish, Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“I shouldn't think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. ”
― George Carlin

“In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”
― Thurgood Marshall

“It is my belief that conscious African American students ought to be in a constant state of rage and in a constant search for ways to channel that rage into freedom struggle.”
― Pearl Cleage

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“The reality of what we really are is often times found in the small snips, way down at the bottom of things.”
― Jean Shepherd

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
― Jim Harrison

“This was the face of slavery. To have nothing, and still have something more to lose.”
― Lalita Tademy, Cane River

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.”
― Mary Oliver

“Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox