Nancy > Nancy's Quotes

“Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”
― Methodist Pastor David Barnhart

“How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?” She thought about it, and then she said, “Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you’ll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right? “But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?”
― Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

“Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother's unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.”
― Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

“Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap—that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself.”
― Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

“He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once—his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one-room flop, poor Danny sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and Jules dead—and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.”
― Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

“With all due respect, sir,” she said, “I do not believe justice will ever be truly possible, economic or otherwise, for any human being, until we have once and for all emancipated the vagina.”
― Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

“cruelty and hope should never be served together.”
― Jess Walter, The Cold Millions

“Wondered which wounded the soul more, living in a country that had never kept any of its promises or seeing America’s capacity for good catch wind and fly for a while, only to come crashing back down.”
― Attica Locke, Guide Me Home

“For a human to love without expecting love in return is hugely liberating. To leave the self out of love is like escaping the grip of gravity. It is to grow wings. It opens up the sky.”
― Sy Montgomery, The Hawk's Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty

“I could lay here and read all night. I am not able to fall asleep without reading. You have the time when your brain has nothing to do so it rambles. I fool my brain out of that by making it read until it shuts off. I just think it is best to do something right up until you fall asleep.”
― Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster

“This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us.”
― Patrick Ryan, Buckeye

“This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us. And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.”
― Patrick Ryan, Buckeye