Donna > Donna's Quotes

“Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all.”
― Anita Shreve

“At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations. What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.”
― Shirley Hazzard

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“How should we judge who is fit and who isn't, Peg? Should it be how clever you are, or how rich? Or should it be how kind you are, the unique way you see the world, or maybe how often you make others smile?”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“There was a difference between a book that was regularly opened and a book that was not. The smell, the resistance of the spine, the ease with which the pages turned. this book felt a little like ours, but I knew it would fall open on a different scene, and that the pages with creased corners or worn edges would not be the same pages Ma had read over and over. When we bound these books, I thought, they were identical. But I realized they couldn't stay that way. As soon as someone cracks the spine a book develops a character all its own. What impresses or concerns one reader is never the same as what impresses or concerns all others. So, each book, once read, will fall open at a different place. Each book, once read, I realized, will have told a slightly different story.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“A woman, in the end, was no single thing, but an amalgam of hurts and dreams, victories and secrets, beauty and ugliness. And if she found another kindred soul in the universe with whom to share the complication of her being, with whom to make of her past a canvas of colliding colors to wonder at, then she was lucky.”
― Meghan Perry, Water Finds a Way

“because I know the difference between preaching and anesthesia.”
― Monica Wood, Any Bitter Thing

“It is possible that I have attached these images to the wrong day in my desire to remember something of my parents, if only the reverberation caused by news of their death. The human craving is for story, not truth. Memory, I believe, embraces its errors, until what is and what is remembered become one.”
― Monica Wood, Any Bitter Thing

“Outside of the books and lectures, he discovered prayer. Real prayer, not the romantic notions of his fervid boyhood___God is my father, God is my friend, God is my protector.
No. God is not this, God is not that. God is.
In his solitary hours at chapel, he came to understand that the opposite of God is not Satan. The opposite of God is not evil. The opposite of God is absence.”
― Monica Wood, Any Bitter Thing

“These bruised people shored me up, and I wanted them near me, not because misery loved company but because the business of human striving felt common to us all. In this was the presence of God.”
― Monica Wood, Any Bitter Thing

“I had never expected that a daughter of mine would look like Debbie. When I found out I'd be having a girl I had pictured...oh, a small, pale, bony girl with a watchfull stillness to her, and she might wear horn-rimmed glasses and in her teens she wouldn't date much and her friends would address her as Deborah. But children veer out from their parents like so many explorers in the wilderness, I've learned. They're not mere duplicates of them. I was fascinated by that.”
― Anne Tyler

“That's something you forget when you've been on your own awhile: those married-couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks, sometimes, branching out and doubling back and looping into earlier strands like a piece of crochet work.”
― Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

“What she believed was that goodness and badness came out of people because of how they were treated. And if you wanted goodness from others, that's what you let come out of you. And the badness? Well, sometimes it slipped out, too, because no one was all one thing or another, but you forgave yourself when you were not who you wanted to be and you did the same with others. It was a pretty simple way of being, but it was one she could understand and believe in and follow.”
― William Kent Krueger, The River We Remember

“....the restless chattering in his head abruptly ceases. Just as the ocean manifests as a wave or surf, but neither wave nor surf is the ocean, so also the Creator - God or Brahma - generates an impression of the universe that takes the form of a Swedish doctor or a blind leper.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“If her son had a calling, had one passion, it was for wards on a page, and the magical way they could transport him and his listeners to faraway lands. "Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, QueeQueg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“....sometimes when your are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Sometimes I suspect that what people really resent is not the change in (grammar). What people resent is being told that the world that they have known has changed, and that even now they have to get used to something new.”
― Jennifer Finney Boylan, Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us

“Somewhere in the echo of time, the universe had decided that happiness of a certain kind was not to be mine. I would have to find joy elsewhere.”
― Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers