Brandy King > Brandy's Quotes

“That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.”
― Derrick A. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

“Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Linger

“Trivia are not knowledge. Lists of facts don't comprise knowledge. Analyzing, hypothesizing, concluding from data, sharing insights, those comprise knowledge. You can't google for knowledge.”
― Elaine Chaika

“The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.”
― Henry Ward Beecher

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do.”
― Jana Stanfield

“Without suffering, there'd be no compassion.”
― Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
― Aristotle

“The thing with Melissa is that I fully and completely and 100 percent understand and comprehend what she is saying -- to its fullest meaning -- within the first fifteen seconds. And unfailingly by the end of the third sentence. I'm not saying I'm that smart. I'm saying I get her that well. We Two Are One. But her purpose is not to merely convey to me the story or the information until I have comprehended. Her purpose is to take a long luxurious bath in my ear and to disgorge the entire unedited contents of her brain -- with sidebars, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and repetitions -- so that she can examine those contents. She is processing. She long ago abandoned those one-line phone messages and three-sentence notes when we were roommates. When she senses, somehow, that she is running out of time or your patience, she'll say, 'okay, a long story short' -- and then continue on her winding circuitous, often amusing way for another several detailed chapters. And I understand every single word of it, every stop for gas, every detour. I think what she thinks.”
― Gabrielle Hamilton

“Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What’s remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives. What”
― Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me