Harper > Harper's Quotes

“A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

“But then I grew up, experienced some life, and I understood that when you merely switch from being a prisoner to being a guard, no one is freed, not even yourself.”
― Lisa Crystal Carver

“Mrs. Smiling's second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for the perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“If any preposterous bill were brought forward, for giving poor grubbing devils of authors a right to their own property I should like to say, that I for one would never consent to opposing an insurmountable bar to the diffusion of literature among the people...”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“When you have lived your life under such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.”
― Cintra Wilson

“If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“100 years ago, buying something you could make was considered wasteful; now making something you could buy is considered wasteful. I am not convinced this is a step in the right direction.”
― Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, All Wound Up: The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin

“Many supporters believe--or want to believe--that Obama will be a transformative political leader in a transformative time. They eagerly await the flowering of peace and social justice policies that will open a new chapter in the abatement of "the structural inequalities that our nation's legacy of discrimination has left behind." Whether Obama, carrying the weight of race on his shoulders in a manner no other United States president ever has, will provide leadership and initiative on these issues is yet to be seen. At every opportunity, we should remind him to try.”
― Clarence Lusane, The Black History of the White House

“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.”
― Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family

“It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“How beautiful the world is, and how ugly labyrinths are,' I said, relieved.
'How beautiful the world would be if there was a procedure for moving through labyrinths,' my master replied.”
― Umberto Eco

“It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read.”
― Elizabeth Savage, Last Night at the Ritz

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories.”
― Elizabeth Savage, The Last Night at the Ritz

“The last days before graduation are bad enough, God knows--out of the womb you go, ready or not. The halls rang with the laughter of the girls who were going to be brides in the next week (and widows shortly after)...”
― Elizabeth Savage, Last Night at the Ritz

“Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.”
― James Herriot, James Herriot's Cat Stories

“I've asked around and haven't found a B.A. yet who doesn't still have nightmares (and I don't speak figuratively) about not being able to find the room where the exam is to be given or about realizing at the last moment that he has not once attended the course.”
― Elizabeth Savage, The Last Night at the Ritz

“I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.”
― Rick Steves

“This old man had once told me that he left school when he was twelve, whereas I had spent most of the twenty-four years in my life in study. Yet when I looked back on the last hour or so I could come to only one conclusion. I'd had more of books, but he had more of learning.”
― James Herriot, All Things Wise and Wonderful

“A farmer once told me one of the greatest luxuries of his life was to wake up early only to go back to sleep again.”
― James Herriot

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.”
― Jill Lepore

“One should always be suspicious of a woman who tells you that her past was burnt in the flames of a schoolhouse in Peshawar.”
― Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders

“Originally, I had planned to study tourism and revolution, which seemed to me to name the two poles of modern consciousness--a willingness to accept, even venerate, things as they are on the one hand, a desire to transform things on the other.”
― Dean MacCannell, The Tourist

“When I speak of home, I speak of the place where in default of a better--those I love are gathered together; and if that place where a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding.”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.”
― Sarah Vowell

“I'm always disappointed when I see the word "Puritan" tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates