Liz Rosenberg > Liz's Quotes

“Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.”
― Ved Mehta, All for Love

“And that was the thing: you couldn't just stand there gawking at the world. A car slipped by. Then another. It was as if she'd stood frozen by the river of the world and gratefully stepped back into it, resuming her place... The world waited, cold, grim, alive, beautiful. There was no saying no to it.”
― Liz Rosenberg, Home Repair: A Moving Novel About One Woman's Journey from Heartbreak to Hope

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“The purpose of family is to preserve life,' Aunt Patti said. 'We treat family members the way we're supposed to treat everyone on the planet.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Laws of Gravity

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
― L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“If you think you have come to an unhappy ending, it is not the true end. Keep going awhile.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Moonlight Palace

“Let’s agree right here at the outset that memory is made up of one part perception, one part intuition, and one part pure invention.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Moonlight Palace

“Nonsense,” Bridget said. “The secret to happiness is freedom—and the secret to freedom is courage.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Moonlight Palace

“These secrets came down my own ornately curved and twisting family line. For family stories are never as direct as history books, and therefore they are more true.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Moonlight Palace

“I am remembering it now.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Laws of Gravity

“Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.”
― Robert Cormier, Tenderness

“I learned for the first time that when we lose the people closest to us, we tend to become more like them—as if to fill immediately the unbearable lack they have left behind.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Moonlight Palace

“People get so frightened for no reason, but I'll tell you, to live with no purpose is a far more frightening proposition... You bring yourself to say yes when you always thought the only possible answer was no, and your whole world changes.”
― Liz Rosenberg

“I’ve been doing research on my own and conducting interviews with some of the local librarians. Very valuable people, librarians. Like your family, they keep all kinds of records. And unlike your family, they tend not to burn them.”
― Liz Rosenberg, The Moonlight Palace

“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”
― Michael Pollan

“Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.”
― Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing with our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside