Katie > Katie's Quotes

“People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. —NELSON MANDELA, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM”
― Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Since childhood, I’d believed it was important to speak out against bullies while also not stooping to their level. And to be clear, we were now up against a bully, a man who among other things demeaned minorities and expressed contempt for prisoners of war, challenging the dignity of our country with practically his every utterance. I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it. It was dignity I wanted to make an appeal for—the idea that as a nation we might hold on to the core thing that had sustained my family, going back generations. Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“We all play a role in this democracy. We need to remember the power of every vote. I continue, too, to keep myself connected to a force that’s larger and more potent than any one election, or leader, or news story—and that’s optimism. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“When people think of food stamps they don't envision someone like me, someone plain faced and white, someone like the girl they'd known in highschool, someone who'd been quiet but nice, someone like a neighbor, someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that with one lost job, one divorce, they'd be in the same place as me.”
― Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

“It seemed like certain members of society looked for opportunities to judge and scold poor people for what they felt we didn’t deserve.”
― Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

“We were expected to live off minimum wage, to work several jobs at varying hours, to afford basic needs while fighting for safe places to leave our children. Somehow nobody saw the work; they saw only the results of living a life that constantly crushed you with its impossibility. It seemed like no matter how much I tried to prove otherwise, “poor” was always associated with dirty.”
― Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

“demonstrates quite clearly Swift’s maxim that you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“It's crazy how lonely it is to be in a family.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“Marriages are the original tiny cult.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“The relationship between those who have burned the most fossil fuels and those who will suffer the most from a warming climate is perversely inverted. The inversion is both chronological (younger generations pay for their elders’ emissions) and socioeconomic (the poor suffer what the rich deserve).”
― Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History

“Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History

“I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: that restless feeling dissolves like butter.”
― Karin Slaughter, Pretty Girls

“One thing that frees me from that battlefield is knowing that my strength and athletic build helped save my life.”
― Hillary Allen, Out and Back: A Runner's Story of Survival Against All Odds

“The vast majority of runners, however, seldom train at a truly comfortable intensity. Instead, they push themselves a little day after day, often without realizing it. If the typical elite runner does four easy runs for every hard run, the average recreationally competitive runner—and odds are, you’re one of them—does just one easy run for every hard run. Simply put: Running too hard too often is the single most common and detrimental mistake in the sport.”
― Matt Fitzgerald, 80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster by Training Slower

“The reality of adult love is that it is conditional, inherently uncertain, and fraught with risk. The idea of security is a total illusion. A literal mindfuck. Not to mention this cruel twist of fate: that we are unconsciously drawn to partners who mirror our unresolved issues from childhood.”
― Todd Baratz, How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind: Forget the Fairy Tale and Get Real