Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”
― Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“I realized, listening to the silences that fell sometimes in my interview groups, that there are things that are sayable and unsayable about motherhood today. It is permissable, for example, to talk a lot about guilt, but not a lot about ambition. You can talk a lot about sex (or its lack) but not about the feelings that are keeping women from sleeping with their husbands. You can talk about society's lack of "appreciation" of mother's and the need for more social validation -- but not about policy that might actually make life better. You cannot really challenge the American culture of rugged individualism.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“The Mommy Mystique tells us that we are the luckiest women in the world -- the freest, with the most choices, the broadest horizons, the best luck, and the most wealth. It says we have the knowledge and know-how to make "informed decisions" that will guarantee the successful course of our children's lives. It tells us that if we choose badly our children will fall prey to countless dangers -- from insecure attachment to drugs to kidnapping to a third-rate college. And if this happens, if our children stray from the path toward happiness and success, we will have no one but ourselves to blame. Because to point fingers out at society, to look beyond ourselves, is to shirk "personal responsibility." To admit that we cannot do everything ourselves, that indeed we need help -- and help on a large, systematic scale -- is tantamount to admitting personal failure.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“What kind of choice is it, really, when motherhood forces you into a delicate balancing act -- not just between work and family, as the equation is typically phrased, but between your premotherhood and postmotherhood identities? What kind of choice is it when you have to choose between becoming a mother and remaining yourself?”
― judith warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sense that after all the hard work, for all our achievements as individuals and as a "postfeminist" generation, life should be better than this.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“Too many of us now allow ourselves to be defined by motherhood and direct every ounce of our energy into our children. This sounds noble on the surface but in fact it's doing no one-- not ourselves, or our children -- any good. Because when we lose ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this loss as depression. When we disempower ourselves in our mommy selves, we experience this weakness as anxiety. When we desexualize ourselves in our mommy selves, it leads us to feel dead in our skin. All this places an undue burden upon our children. By making them the be-all-and-end-all of our lives, by breaking down the boundaries between ourselves and them so thoroughly, by giving them so much power within the family when they're very small, we risk overwhelming them psychologically and ill-preparing them, socially, for the world of other children and, eventually, other adults. Nursery school and kindergarten teachers are already complaining that our children are so indulged, made so royal at home, that they come to school lacking compassion for others and with real problems functioning socially.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“For too many women in America are becoming sick with exhaustion and stress as they try to do things that can't be -- shouldn't be -- done. Too many are eaten up by resentment toward their husbands, who are not subject to the same heartless pressures. Too many are becoming anxious and depressed because they are overwhelmed and disappointed. Too many are letting their lives be poisoned by guilt because their expectations can't be met, and because there is an enormous cognitive dissonance between what they know to be right for themselves and what they're told is right for their children. Too many feel out of control.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“I found that when women were able to act in line with their natural inclinations and ambitions -- whether to work or stay at home -- they were generally happy, and generally felt that their children were happy too. Whereas those whose natural inclinations and ambitions had been thwarted -- whether they were working or stay-at-home moms -- were sure that they and their kids would be better off if they changed course, and either went to work or went home. The morality of the situation-- whether they felt it was good or bad for their chidlren-- derived, not from some external sense of the morality of their "choices," but from the amount of happiness generated by any given arrangement.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“--what's really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it's a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distracting emotion, personality foibles, or less-than-ideal experiences.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“We seem to feel as though the life our children have -- that we have built for them -- is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all its carefully selected components, and that the slightest shock, the slightest jar to all our perfect orchestration, will bring the whole edifice crashing down.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“The media not only fans our fears, it comforts us in our hubris. Nearly every scare story comes with a Message: You can take control. You can do something to keep bad things from happening to your children and to keep life from throwing you curveballs.”
― Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

“Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“It’s a small story really, about, among other things:

* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
* A Jewish fist fighter
* And quite a lot of thievery”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“My words are unerring tools of
destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“Where do you live?"
Adam's mouth was very set. "A place made for leaving"
"That's not really an answer."
"It's not really a place.”
― Maggie Stiefvater

“How do you feel about helicopters?"
There was a long pause. "How do you mean? Ethically?"
"As a mode of transportation."
"Faster than camels, but less sustainable.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“It's a hard thing to hold a civil conversation after recalling that one party has used a Taser on the other, so both of them finished the walk in silence.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“In that moment, Blue was a little in love with all of them.
Their magic. Their quest. Their awfulness and strangeness.
Her raven boys.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“There were times in my life when I had one thing to do all day, but I still couldn’t get to it. “I gotta go to the post office, but I’d probably have to put on pants. And they’re only open till five. Looks like I’m going to have to do that next week.”
― Jim Gaffigan, Dad Is Fat