Lori > Lori's Quotes

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“[I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant

“[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
― Jim Henson, It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider

“Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“If our goal is to slow migration, then the best way to do so is to work for a more equitable global system. But slowing migration is an odd goal, if the real problem is global inequality.”
― Aviva Chomsky, "They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths about Immigration

“Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.”
― Aviva Chomsky, "They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths about Immigration

“Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“París no se acaba nunca, y el recuerdo de cada persona que ha vivido allí es distinto del recuerdo de cualquier otro... Y eso es muy cierto aunque lo haya dicho Hemingway, que ha sido el escritor más ególatra y narcisista del siglo.”
― Leonardo Padura

“El calor lo aplasta todo, tiraniza al mundo, corroe lo salvable y despierta sólo las iras, los rencores, las envidias, los odios más infernales, como si su propósito fuera provocar el fin de los tiempos, la historia, la humanidad y la memoria...”
― Leonardo Padura

“You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The proverbial hospitality of the South may be selectively extended but it is not a myth.”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“[P]laces that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“A crushed hope is suffused with a nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years