Elisabeth > Elisabeth's Quotes

“But maybe being a father was like this. Just being there and doing what needed to be done, one small task at a time until they added up to something good.”
― Abby Jimenez, Life's Too Short

“If you spend your life dwelling on the worst possible thing, when it finally happens, you’ve lived it twice. I don’t want to live the worst things twice.”
― Abby Jimenez, Life's Too Short

“I wondered how long the ripple effect lasted after someone died. Maybe until everyone who knew them was dead too? Or was it something that went on for generation after generation because the damage was handed down, touching each new person and changing them, even if they don’t know why? Something told me it was that one.”
― Abby Jimenez, Life's Too Short

“There was something eternally endearing about a person who could see what Adrian had seen and not run or judge you. It made me feel safe and stable. Like I’d been drifting in the wind and I’d found a strong, deep-rooted tree to perch on and take sanctuary in. I felt like I could be any level of fucked up or crazy and he’d still be there, holding me.”
― Abby Jimenez, Life's Too Short

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly, that just to be alive, is a grand thing. Agatha Christie, 1890–1976”
― Abby Jimenez, Life's Too Short

“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun,” a quote from Marcus Aurelius,”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Like most stupid people, Mr. Sloane wasn’t smart enough to know just how stupid he was.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“She was like a practical priest, someone to whom one could confess things—fears, hopes, mistakes—and expect in return, not a simpleton’s recipe for prayers and beads, or a psychologist’s standard “And how does that make you feel?” runaround, but actual wisdom. How to get on with the business at hand. How to survive.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Because love, at its root, is hope. Hope for tomorrow. Hope for what could be. Hope that the someone you’ve entrusted your everything to will cradle and protect it. And hope? That shit is harder to kill than a dragon.”
― Rebecca Yarros, Iron Flame

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. —attributed to Margaret Mead”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“A rich language environment “is like oxygen. It’s easy to take for granted until you see someone who isn’t getting enough.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“The essential factor that determined the future learning trajectory of a child was the early language environment: how much and how a parent talked to a child. Children in homes in which there was a lot of parent talk, no matter the educational or economic status of that home, did better. It was as simple as that.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“optimum brain development is language dependent. The words we hear, how many we hear, and how they are said are determining factors in its development.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“In the end, quantity of words is important, but only as an adjunct to the loving, nurturing relationship that is determined by a baby’s caretaker. There may be many words, but their positive effect on the brain is dependent on responsiveness and warmth.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“From birth through about three years of age, each second represents the creation, by the brain, of seven hundred to one thousand additional neuronal connections.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“language, during the first three years, in addition to helping build vocabulary and conversational skills, helps provide a foundation for social, emotional, and cognitive development.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Imaging of babies’ brains shows that even before they say their first words, they are mentally practicing responding, trying to figure out how to create the motor movements necessary to articulate the words of their language.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“caregiver’s language is the essential resource of every country, every culture, every person, extending into every crevice of who we are, what we can do, and how we behave.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Neuroscience is like an intriguing mystery novel with sharp-brained detectives, who happen to have PhDs, ferreting out clues that will finally let us know, on the last page, why we are the way we are.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“That interconnected wiring is called the connectome. And that connectome, the ten thousand connections per neuron linking the one hundred billion neurons in each of our brains, is what makes us who we are, including how we think and how we behave.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Referring to the number of words a parent speaks to a child and the way in which a parent speaks to a child, parent language influences our ability to reach our potentials in math, spatial reasoning, and literacy, our ability to regulate our behavior, our reaction to stress, our perseverance and even our moral fiber. It is also an essential catalyst in determining the strength and permanence of certain neuronal wirings and the pruning away of others.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“the genetic potentials we’ve been awarded by the chance of parentage can be mitigated, destroyed, or achieved by our second round of luck, the parental language environment we experience as children.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Words, as we know from their impact on self-image, also impact skills. When your self-image is as a math “nonperformer” and you’re challenged to learn a math skill, your brain uses up your intellectual energy by arguing with you that you really can’t do it, a kind of mental barricade on the road to accomplishment. You may inherently have the ability to learn it, but that ability is eroded by the roiling doubts that wear it away.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“If praise is not handled properly,” Carol Dweck has said, “it can become a negative force, a kind of drug that, rather than strengthening students, makes them passive and dependent on the opinion of others.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“One-year-old babies whose mothers calmly suggested, rather than dictated, rules for behavior, were found at age three to have notably stronger executive function and self-regulation.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“self-regulation in children is enhanced when parents support their children’s control of their own behavior, when they explain reasons for rules, and when they provide non-emotional reasons for discipline.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“Now I look at the adults who care for them and think, “You are more powerful than you ever imagined and I hope you know it.”
― Dana Suskind, Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain

“To damage the earth is to damage your children. —WENDELL BERRY, FARMER AND POET”
― Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds

“My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He used to tell me that courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds

“Jack says that I am a warrior and, while I don’t believe it, I know this: A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds