Jenny > Jenny's Quotes

“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“How else could it be with such consuming hair?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.

Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse

Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.”
― Lorrie Moore

“She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“At 14, I am an experiment. Inside, I am resurrected. I am in the middle of the kind of explosion of perspective that, in later years, I will pay a great deal of money to emulate in nightclubs, and at parties, in bathrooms--counting out tenners for pills in order to feel a tenth this remorseless, expanded, and inspired.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“I don’t think it should be socially acceptable for people to say they are “bad with names.” No one is bad with names. That is not a real thing. Not knowing people’s names isn’t a neurological condition; it’s a choice. You choose not to make learning people’s names a priority. It’s like saying, “Hey, a disclaimer about me: I’m rude.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to temp us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand,' said Ira, but Mike had already taken it.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“It's so difficult to sustain a fatwa,' said Domenica. 'One has to be so enthusiastic. I'm not sure if I could find the moral energy myself.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, 44 Scotland Street

“In such a way is freedom of thought lost... By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, 44 Scotland Street

“It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“She was monumentally, conspicuously damaged in a way that was, to us then, ineffably chic.”
― Katie Roiphe

“Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“There may be no book on the mothers of poets, or artists in general, but it might one day be written and would be, I think, an enlightening read.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W.H. Auden Can Do for You

“That's an incredibly depressing thought," I said "that if you're in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“...when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia