Lea A > Lea's Quotes

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Hope,’ he said. ‘Damn thing never leaves you alone.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,’ he said, ‘and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn’t that how it might be, trying to learn Josie’s heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn’t there always be others you’d not yet entered?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman”.

Words are not small things.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Another morning comes. It always does. Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with. *”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“There are few words that are harder to explain than "loyalty." It's always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“It’s not that smart people aren’t capable of believing in cultish things; instead, says Shermer, it’s that smart people are better at “defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“words are the medium through which belief systems are manufactured, nurtured, and reinforced, their fanaticism fundamentally could not exist without them.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“The biggest joke in religious studies is that cult + time = religion.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“There’s a reason most religions encourage prayer: Language strengthens beliefs.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“Contentious debates aside, thought-terminating clichés also pervade our everyday conversations: Expressions like “It is what it is,” “Boys will be boys,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “It’s all God’s plan,” and certainly “Don’t think about it too hard” are all common examples.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“Totalitarian leaders can’t hope to gain or maintain power without using language to till a psychological schism between their followers and everyone else.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“That’s the trouble with pain. It’s a contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first endured it to those who love them most. Truth isn’t always the highest ideal’ sometimes it must be sacrificed to stop the spread of pain to those you love.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“I’ll never understand it—why people find the truth more shocking than lies.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“I am your maid. I know so much about you. But when it comes down to it: what is that you know about me?”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“Never leave a mess to be discovered by a guest.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“People are a mystery that can never be solved.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid

“That’s because language doesn’t work to manipulate people into believing things they don’t want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they’re already open to. Language—both literal and figurative, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, politically correct and politically incorrect—reshapes a person’s reality only if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“Creating special language to influence people’s behavior and beliefs is so effective in part simply because speech is the first thing we’re willing to change about ourselves . . . and also the last thing we let go.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“This makes sense, because in every corner of life, business and otherwise, when you can tell deep down that something is ethically wrong but are having trouble pinpointing why, language is a good place to look for evidence.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“Language change is always reflective of social change, and over the decades, as our sources, of connections and existential purpose has shifted due to the phenomena like social media, increased globalization, and withdrawal from traditional religion we've seen the rise of more alternative subgroups-some dangerous, some not so much. "Cult" has evolved to describe them all.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“By staying calm, they’re showing their child that a mother can handle anything. A mother is always patient. A mother is always kind. A mother is always giving. A mother never falls apart. A mother is the buffer between her child and the cruel world.”
― Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers