Rob > Rob's Quotes

“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“The ancient Indian epic Mahābhārata asks, “Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.”
― David Shields, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.”
― Edith Wharton, The Spark

“So began a long instruction in whatever he could trust her to forgive.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help.”
― Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive ...”
― Edith Wharton, The Spark

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations… It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm… Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings. —Benedict Anderson”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“This must be the way most of us maneuver in the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the street, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“You decide for yourself when it will hurt.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“. . .there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.”
― Toni Morrison

“... most of her clients didn't really want to get better. They wanted a pill and reassurance that whatever was wrong wasn't their fault.”
― Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace

“Living in the wreckage of her future sure took the joy out of the present. The only comfort was that almost none of her fears had come true.”
― Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“Then I understood I would never marry him. It's funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one's past, or one's clothes, but then—a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immorality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful.”
― David Shields, The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

“It was probably best just to be quiet and wait until the conversation changed, as conversations will when no one is saying anything.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

“And we forget because we must.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Hand That First Held Mine

“There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.”
― Anna Quindlen, One True Thing