Grace > Grace's Quotes

“June really isn't June anymore, Is it?”
― Jane Naviyuk Kane

“Only when the traveler communicates with the city of departure does he realize he has entered a new domain of time...It is then the traveler learns that he is cut off in time, as well as in space. No traveler goes back to his city of origin.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“There were no servants. People just weren't interested in careers in domestic service anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“God doesn't protect people from knives, sweetheart. That's why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It's always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“I can't help it. My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“She had never seen me draw–because not drawing and forgetting everything I knew about art, I thought, was the magic key to my becoming a serious painter.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“AHHHHH,” like George Clooney on ER, like she was off to go slice out the tumor that had lately been pressing on the world’s optic nerve. She wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Context collapse! That sounded pretty bad, didn't it? And also like the thing that was happening to the honeybees?”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Racism, for many people, seems to occupy space in very much the same way as dark matter: it forms the skeleton of our world, yet remains ultimately invisible, undetectable. This is convenient. If nothing is racist, then nothing needs to be done to address it.”
― Alicia Elliott, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

“Enamorarse es amar las coincidencias, y amar, enamorarse de las diferencias.”
― Jorge Bucay, Amarse con los ojos abiertos

“...God created the world in six days. On the seventh day, he rested. On the eighth day, he started getting complaints. And it hasn't stopped since.”
― James Scott Bell, Sins of the Fathers

“Forget about what pop psychology did to the term self-care. All it means is to care for self. Your body, your mind, your space. And here is the great news: You do not have to care about yourself to care for yourself.”
― KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

“Why conduct a war and then say “Sorry” when someone is dead? I”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale