Emily Brown > Emily's Quotes

“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.”
― Richard Dawkins

“One gram of rich forest soil contains an estimated 100 million prokaryotes.”
― Nicholas P. Money, The Amoeba in the Room: Lives of the Microbes

“There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all Italy, but could be easily buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to dissertations on it. I do not, therefore, though an earnest admirer of Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at any length on famous Pictures and Statues.”
― Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy

“Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“By shifting to a highly digestible, cooked diet, our forebears no longer needed the massive molars and expansive guts that apes need to process fibrous raw foods. And with so much more energy available, we could suddenly afford the metabolic demands of a larger brain.”
― Thor Hanson, The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History

“No doubt Noah offered his wife that olive branch. Forty days in a boat with those animals to clean up after? A peace offering likely all that stood between their marriage and bloody murder.”
― Gregory Maguire, Egg & Spoon

“As Solomon said in the Old Book, if two women squabble over which of them is the mother of a certain infant, the way to solve the problem is to cut the baby in half and share the baby in parts.”
― Gregory Maguire, Egg & Spoon

“Stanbridge’s text continues with a variety of phrases a schoolboy needs to know, presented in seemingly random order: “I am weary of study. I am weary of my life… . I am almost beshitten. You stink… . Turd in your teeth… . I will kill you with my own knife. He is the biggest coward that ever pissed.” Clearly Stanbridge chose topics that would interest young boys, but he is not trying to pique their interest by using bad words.”
― Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

“The style of bathing suit we now know as the bikini existed before then, but got its name only when the designer Louis Réard chose to use it to draw attention to a collection he was showing a few days after the bomb test. Bikini, we might argue, should have become a word to sum up the devastation that a nuclear weapon can cause; instead it became a word for a skimpy piece of beach attire. One”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The five branches are immortalized in every medical student’s memory as Two Zombies Buggered My Cat (Temporal, Zygomatic, Buccal, Mandibular and Cervical). Remembering”
― Gavin Francis, Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum

“They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

“Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.”
― Joanne Woodward

“Cocaine Suppe Mit Tittenschnakken,”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“anything was better than the horrible state of things below. I remember very well going to the hatchway and putting my head down, when I was oppressed by nausea, and always being relieved immediately. It was an effectual emetic.”
― Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea

“Much has been said of the sunrise at sea; but it will not compare with the sunrise on shore. It lacks the accompaniments of the songs of birds, the awakening hum of humanity, and the glancing of the first beams upon trees, hills, spires, and housetops, to give it life and spirit. There is no scenery. But, although the actual rise of the sun at sea is not so beautiful, yet nothing will compare for melancholy and dreariness with the early breaking of day upon “Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste.”
― Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea

“There is something in the first gray streaks stretching along the eastern horizon and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which combines with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around, and gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can. This gradually passes away as the light grows brighter, and when the sun comes up, the ordinary monotonous sea day begins.”
― Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea

“You decide who you are. You can have something horrible happen to you and become Batman, or you can become the Joker. You can get swept up in horrible circumstances and bad choices, but you don’t need to. You can exert force on your own life. You can steer your own path. I did try to follow that, even in those special difficult times known as primary and secondary school. No matter what peers or adults were putting me through, I didn’t need to let it make me a certain way. I didn’t have to become mean, or bitter or angry. I employed”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“It’s not bad to have a second family, and it’s okay to have a different kind of family. Especially one who understands you at your core level like that.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Canadian team created the Enviropig, an environmentally friendly transgenic pig containing an E. coli gene that allowed the animals to better digest a phosphorus-containing compound called phytate. Normal pig manure retains high phosphorus levels that leach into streams and rivers, causing algal blooms, the death of aquatic animals, and the production of greenhouse gases; Enviropig manure contained 75 percent less phosphorus, which could have been an enormous benefit to the planet and to the people who lived and worked near pig farms. Despite this, though, and despite reassuring safety data, consumers decried the Enviropig, causing the project’s financial backers to pull the plug.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“Animal research is indispensable to the study of human disease, whether it’s used to confirm the genetic causes of certain disorders, to evaluate potential drugs, or to test the efficacy of medical interventions like surgery or cell therapy.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“sand.”
― Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm

“She asks Mimi and me to tea this afternoon at Diana’s Grove, and hopes that you also will favour her.”
― Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm

“The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and that thing was really good? They say you are an African witch, and so what? So what? Who told them what a witch was?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“No, sir. I was born free, right here in Baltimore.” The policeman smirked. “Go home,” he said. The policeman turned and walked away, and the quaking that had been held somewhere inside Jo’s bones started to escape until he was sitting on the hard ground, trying to hold himself together.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Jo had been hearing talk of war for years. It didn’t mean much to him, and he tried to veer away from the conversation whenever he could, leery of Southern sympathizers in the North or, worse, overly enthusiastic white Northerners who wanted him to be angrier and louder, to defend himself and his right to freedom. But Jo wasn’t angry. Not anymore. He couldn’t really tell if what he had been before was angry. It was an emotion he had no use for, that accomplished nothing and meant even less than that. If anything, what Jo really felt was tired.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”
― Yaa Gyasi