Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

“You can be lonely even when you are loved by many people, since you are still not anybody's one and only.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don't necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can't accept, but still a religion, it doesn't matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn't the fear of God but the upholding of one's own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the while day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: "A quiet conscience mades one strong!”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“You told me once you forget you are a woman, and I understand it now – you think to be a woman is to be weak – you think ours is a sisterhood of suffering! Perhaps so, but doesn’t it take greater strength to walk a mile in pain than seven miles in none? You are a woman, and must begin to live like one. By which I mean: have courage.”
― Sarah Perry

“Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs.”
― Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

“They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“You took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favor," said Vimes. "And to protect the innocent. That's all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. You're an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Y’know,’ he said, ‘it’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Everyone says it's going to be Snapcase at the palace. He listens to the people."
"Yeah, right," said Vimes. And I listen to the thunder. But I don't do anything about it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Legitimate First watched them go as they walked away. Sergeant Colon felt he was being measured up.

"I've always wondered about his name," said Nobby, turning and waving. "I mean...Legitimate?"

"Can't blame a mother for being proud, Nobby," said Colon.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“The horsemen came closer.

Vimes was not good at horsemen. Something in him resented being addressed by anyone eight feet above the ground. He didn't like the sensation of being looked at by nostrils.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, they house. They get to choose to make black babies, then disappear into thin air, like they wasn't never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell 'em; now they just send 'em to prison like my daddy, so that they can't be with they kids.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“History is Storytelling.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“The white man's god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and tat thing was really good?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“but the older he got, the better he understood; forgiveness was an act done after the fact - a piece of the bad deeds future - and if you point the people's eyes to the future they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing