Audrey Approved > Audrey Approved's Quotes

“Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality. —IRVIN YALOM, PSYCHIATRIST”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“You took me on because I was helpful in your political cause. Because I could aid in your experiments. Beyond that I was of no use to you, and so you abandoned me.” I struggled to get my breath. “I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men.”
― Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

“To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savor how much he likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to produce the right expressions and say the right things. Just to see Helen, her beautiful face, her smile, and to know that she continues loving him, this puts the gift of joy into his day, and for hours he feels nothing but a light-headed happiness.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“The widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by, and not getting by.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“There've been several times in our friendship when Rose and I reached what I feared was its conclusion, when an important update to our subscription to each other had lapsed, and we either had to renew or face the tenuousness of our connection.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Parakeet

“Your closest family returned you to whence you'd came, when you were still a work in progress. They weren't fooled for a second. Older you was a construct.”
― Mhairi McFarlane, If I Never Met You

“Fertility is such a difficult feminist issue because our biology hasn't caught up with our politics.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions

“And you look like the north side of a southbound mule.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn't care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“A joy divided is a joy doubled”
― Aimee Ogden

“The privilege of a place can depend on the absence of the wrong body as much as the presence of the right one.”
― Jo Hamya, Three Rooms

“Before calling my mother, I was an unhappy, failing adult. After calling my mother, I was an unhappy, failing child.”
― Jo Hamya, Three Rooms

“Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.”
― Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus

“Environmental changes over a much longer timescale can be met by evolution adopting the body or physiology of a species over the generations (such as the camel adopting to constantly arid conditions). Intelligence on the other hand is the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“Freedom is when … you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.”
― Svletana Alexievich

“A person can be completely right about something but still not have the right to say it.”
― Jamie Zeppa, Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan

“Went to the Zoo, I said to Him- Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.”
― Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife

“An ideology defined only by what it opposes is doomed to be defined by that exact thing.”
― Ling Ma

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They're wrong. It's love.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“Being a mother must be the saddest yet most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible