Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.

Not that year.

Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard; the world remained unfriendly and cold.”
― Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people's most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country.”
― Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle

“Where do [writers] get [their] ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where the come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven, and we reach and grab one, to grasp in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a cafe and a whole novel will be built from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend in a supermarket . . . .”
― John Boyne, A Ladder to the Sky

“A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.”
― Jane Smiley

“I knew all about the Crash on Wall Street but didn't really know what that meant. When I first heard it, I imagined Wall Street like this giant castle wall, and the banks and all their money were hidden behind it. And then one day--they called it Black Friday, and when I imagined it I saw it happening under a dark, threatening, sky--that wall came tumbling down, and all the money the banks had stashed away just kind of went up with the wind and vanished. On the edge of the Great Plains, it didn't interest or really affect me. Out there nobody had money." pp. 52-53”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“I'd promised myself I wouldn't cry. I wanted to deliver the only gift I had to offer in the memory of Cora Frost. But as I started blowing the first notes of "Shenandoah," the tears began to run. I played on anyway, and Miss Stratton followed, and the music itself seemed to weep and not just for what we'd lost that week. It was for the families and the childhoods and the dreams that were, even for those of us so young, already gone forever. But as I continued, I went to that place only music could take me, and although Cora Frost was dead and about to be buried along with my fleeting hope of a better life, I imagined she was listening somewhere, with her husband by her side, and they were both smiling down on me and Emmy and Albert and Mose and all the others whose lives, at least for a while, had been better because of them. And in the end, that's where my tears were coming from." p. 63”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“I'm good at teaching people things. . . . I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I'm much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Just remember, life is a box of cookies. You know how they’ve got these cookie assortments, and you like some but you don’t like others? And you eat up all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don’t like so much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. ‘Now i just have to polish these off, and everything’ll be O.K.’ Life is a box of cookies.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one's own people was always comforting.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“[I]t was not just capitalism that created fantasies through these Ideological State Apparatus and enforced them through Repressive State Apparatuses--so did communism.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Che Guevera and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it close up, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“[B]ooks meant something different when we returned to them later, leavened by life.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“I could live without television, but not without books.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“[W]e watched the three policeman do what men have undoubtedly been doing to women since Adam blamed Eve for listening to the serpent. It had not occurred to me until now, blind man that I was and surely still am, that the serpent was Adam's own uncontrollable penis, which the writer of the Book of Genesis had detached from Adam and flung into the grass. From there it could rear its head and talk Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, as if Adam had nothing to do with it. And how does one eat forbidden fruit? By asking permission? Or by taking it, which, for all we know, Adam might have done and then blamed Eve? If prostitution was the world's oldest profession, then rape was the world's original crime.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep sea-diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's all the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“What makes a person want to shiver in a train station for nothing more than the promise of a secret image? But then, what makes a person drive down an unmarked road in the middle of the night? Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Where do [writers] get [their] ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where they come from and nobody should know. They evolve in the air, they float down from some mysterious heaven and we reach and grab one, to grasp in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a cafe and a whole novel will be built from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend in a supermarket . . . .”
― John Boyne, A Ladder to the Sky

“There was something about the smell of bookshops that was strangely comforting to her. She wondered if it was the scent of ink and paper or the perfume of binding, string, and glue. Maybe it was the scent of knowledge. Information. Thoughts and ideas. Poetry and love. All of it bound into one perfect, calm place.”
― Alyson Richman, The Garden of Letters

“[A] folktale can never be forgotten because it wriggles and rearranges until it sits neatly on the heart. It is fluid and changing, able to adapt to whatever setting it finds itself in. It shifts in the mouth of every teller and adapts to the shape of each listener's ear. The facts can change (place names, the color of a character's woolen coat, the particular flowers in a small, circular garden), but the core remains the same. So the folktale survives. Assimilates. And with it--so survives the memory.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“If a story does its job, it doesn't ever end. Not really. But it can change. This is the nature of folktales. They shift to fit each teller. Take whatever form suits the bearer best. What begins as a story of sorrow can be acknowledged, held like a sweetheart to the chest, rocked and sung to. And then it can be set down to sleep. It can become an offering. A lantern. An ember to lead you through the dark.”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“There was a trick of his imagination which recurred persistently; it had recurred, ever since the last ghastly news was brought by the Dillard's [that the third (and last) son had died in the Civil War]. Ira kept seeing his sons around the place, he kept hearing their voices. Sometimes at home he would be in his tool shed, and it seemed that a corner of his vision caught the impression of young Moses going out the door. He was positive that sometimes lying dry and wakeful in the middle of the night, he heard the faint ring of china from Sutherland's room as the young man got up and used his chamber pot. Ira did not believe in ghosts as such. But he thought that perhaps the actual impression of the boys' living had left a variety of sights, sounds and scents which had never been expended and were not dead, even though the boys were dead. He thought that all the trees and shrubbery and walls and fences on the plantation might have absorbed the day-by-day activities of his sons, and still gave them forth, but faintly--as a roasted brick retain its heat long after it had been pinned up in flannel, and so afforded comfort to the cold feet of the invalid who needed warmth. And Ira needed this reassurance that his sons had once been part of a waking, busy scheme called Life; ah, he needed it.”
― MacKinlay Kantor, Andersonville