Shed > Shed's Quotes

“Uncle Stash said you didn't have to be crazy to to do something stupid, just young.”
― Lori Lansens, The Girls

“I hum some secret place into being, thinking of this other me, the one that only I can see, a girl called She, who is not We, a girl who I will never be.”
― Lori Lansens, The Girls

“What is it about sadness that can be so fulfilling?”
― Lori Lansens, The Girls

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Is it not the case that many a life journey starts out in the opposite direction to its destiny?”
― Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

“sometimes when we look forward to an event with great and happy anticipation, the event itself may disappoint or be in import so different from what we have expected that we can say the anticipated event did not occur at all but some other experience.”
― Sena Jeter Naslund ahab's wife or the star gazer

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men's decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“There is no life without death. That is the true meaning of yin and yang”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind