Katey BC > Katey's Quotes

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
― Robert J. Hanlon

“If you have come to these pages for laughter, may you find it.
If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil.
If you seek an adventure, may this song sing you away to blissful escape.
If you need to test or confirm your beliefs, may you reach comfortable conclusions.
All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not.
May you find that which you seek, in these pages or outside them.
May you find perfection, and know it by name.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“It's true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get in a person's blood even if he doesn't remember having them. ”
― Eva Ibbotson, The Secret of Platform 13

“It’s sarcasm, Josh.”

“Sarcasm?”

“It’s from the Greek, sarkasmos. To bite the lips. It means that you aren’t really saying what you mean, but people will get your point. I invented it, Bartholomew named it.”

“Well, if the village idiot named it, I’m sure it’s a good thing.”

“There you go, you got it.”

“Got what?”

“Sarcasm.”

“No, I meant it.”

“Sure you did.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“Irony, I think.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“So you’re being ironic now, right?”

“No, I really don’t know.”

“Maybe you should ask the idiot.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

“What?”

“Sarcasm.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“I solemnly swear to do my best
Every day, And in all that I do,
To be brave and strong,
To be truthful and compassionate,
To be interesting and interested,
To respect nature,
To pay attention and question
The world around me,
To think of others first,
To ALWAYS help and protect my friends
Then there's a line about God or whatever
And to make the world a better place
For Lumberjane scouts
And for everyone else.”
― N.D. Stevenson, Lumberjanes, Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy

“She was a person like this: full of opinion and firm standing, she planted her flag in more topics than you could quite believe she could actually care about.”
― Emily M. Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines

“It is white people’s responsibility to be less fragile; people of color don’t need to twist themselves into knots trying to navigate us as painlessly as possible.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“To ask people of color to tell us how they experience racism without first building a trusting relationship and being willing to meet them halfway by also being vulnerable shows that we are not racially aware and that this exchange will probably be invalidating for them.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“For those of us who work to raise the racial consciousness of whites, simply getting whites to acknowledge that our race gives us advantages is a major effort. The defensiveness, denial, and resistance are deep.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“If I believe that only bad people are racist, I will feel hurt, offended, and shamed when an unaware racist assumption of mine is pointed out. If I instead believe that having racist assumptions is inevitable (but possible to change), I will feel gratitude when an unaware racist assumption is pointed out; now I am aware of and can change that assumption.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“The most profound message of racial segregation may be that the absence of people of color from our lives is no real loss. Not one person who loved me, guided me, or taught me ever conveyed that segregation deprived me of anything of value. I could live my entire life without a friend or loved one of color and not see that as a diminishment of my life. In fact, my life trajectory would almost certainly ensure that I had few, if any, people of color in my life. I might meet a few people of color if I played certain sports in school, or if there happened to be one or two persons of color in my class, but when I was outside of that context, I had no proximity to people of color, much less any authentic relationships. Most whites who recall having a friend of color in childhood rarely keep these friendships into adulthood. Yet if my parents had thought it was valuable to have cross-racial relationships, they would have ensured that I had them, even if it took effort—the same effort so many white parents expend to send their children across town so they can attend a better (whiter) school. Pause for a moment and consider the profundity of this message: we are taught that we lose nothing of value through racial segregation. Consider the message we send to our children—as well as to children of color—when we describe white segregation as good.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“Joshua's ministry was three years of preaching, sometimes three times a day, and although there were some high and low points, I could never remember the sermons word for word, but here's the gist of almost every sermon I ever heard Joshua give.

You should be nice to people, even creeps.
And if you:
a) believed that Joshua was the Son of God (and)
b) he had come to save you from sin (and)
c) acknowledged the Holy Spirit within you (became as a little child, he would say) (and)
d) didn't blaspheme the Holy Ghost (see c)
then you would:
e) live forever
f) someplace nice
g) probably heavan
However, if you:
h) sinned (and/or)
i) were a hypocrite (and/or)
j) valued things over people (and)
k) didn't do a, b, c, and d,
then you were:
l) fucked”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“When white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn’t solve anything.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational. Sometimes a personal apocalypse, sometimes one that ruins a whole community. It isn’t a single event of biblical proportions, but it is a series of encounters with one or more of the fabled Four Horsemen.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“Lauterpacht's intellectual development coincided with this crucial moment. Engaged n Zionist activity, he nevertheless feared nationalism. The philosopher Martin Buber, who lectured and led in Lemberg became an intellectual influence, opposing Zionism as a form of abhorrent nationalism and holding to the view that a Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably oppress the Arab inhabitants. Lauterpacht attended Buber's lectures and found himself attracted to such ideas, identifying himself as a disciple of Buber's. This was an early fluting of skepticism about the power of the state.”
― Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

“So many things felt so routinely disappointing to her that it seemed a shame to waste this evening on that mild unhappiness, one that she could admit to herself possibly wasn't deserved.”
― Emily M. Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines

“The point is—as far as the Society is concerned—if you are not honest, and determined, and brave, then it doesn’t matter how talented you are.”
― Jessica Townsend, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow

“As wood shattered bones and blood began to flow, the Republic was being inexorably mutilated along with the faces of a lot of Roman people.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“...(O)ver four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation--and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present