Nona Williams > Nona's Quotes

“. While we might believe that pretty is as pretty does, on some level we want to see youth and beauty as signs of goodness, of innocence. The attractive woman is given a pass. The ugly one gets the chair.”
― Nancy Rommelmann, To the Bridge

“There are almost no Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The president’s thoughts were frenetic. It’s a disconcerting experience to attempt a conversation with him because he talks the whole time. He asks questions but then immediately starts to say something else. Almost everything he says he subsequently rephrases two or three times, as if he’s stuck in some holding pattern waiting for an impulse to arrive that kicks off the next thing he wants to say. It all adds up to a bizarre encounter.”
― Andrew G. McCabe, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
― Blake Crouch, Wayward

“that every bodily pain has its source in the soul, every pain is an expression of distress.”
― Anat Talshir, About the Night

“There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of the head of a headdressed, long-haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out. It’s called the Indian Head test pattern. If you left the TV on, you’d hear a tone at 440 hertz—the tone used to tune instruments—and you’d see that Indian, surrounded by circles that looked like sights through riflescopes. There was what looked like a bull’s-eye in the middle of the screen, with numbers like coordinates. The Indian’s head was just above the bull’s-eye, like all you’d need to do was nod up in agreement to set the sights on the target. This was just a test.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Genetics can certainly tell us who our closest relatives really are, and can reveal so many mysteries of our deep past. But you have far less in common with your ancestors than you may realize, and there are people in your family from whom you have inherited no genes at all, and who therefore have no meaningful genetic link to you, even though in a genealogical sense you are most definitely descended from them.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“I realise that what seems to matter so much to us in the here and now is nothing in comparison to the sea and the rocks and the turning of the tides; we’re just tiny grains in the sands of time.”
― Ruth Saberton, The Letter

“We look for sense and we search for patterns or a grand design in the desperate attempt to make meaning out of what frightens us the most – the possibility that there is no meaning. Bad things happen to good people. Evil prospers. Young fit men get sick and die. Children starve. Teenagers are murdered in bomb blasts at music concerts. There is no reason or divine plan. Crap things happen. End of.”
― Ruth Saberton, The Letter

“I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.”
― Olivia Hawker, The Ragged Edge of Night

“A lot of the financial players since the 1970s have indeed evolved into parasites, like tapeworms. Tapeworms live in the gut, to which they attach themselves by “hooks” and “suckers,” then “get food by eating the host’s partly digested food, depriving the host of nutrients.” They can grow hideously large, many feet long, and live inside hosts for decades. Thinking about the future of our political economy, though, I was heartened when I read that “hosts also develop ways of getting rid of or protecting themselves from parasites.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Libertarians fantasize that they’re action heroes and entirely self-made. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it on their own and that unfair disadvantages either don’t exist or can’t be helped. I have a hunch that the demographic profile of self-identified libertarians—94 percent white, 68 percent male, 62 percent in their forties or younger—has something to do with those beliefs and fantasies.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“Everyone has a story they tell themselves about themselves. Even if they don’t explicitly acknowledge it, their minds are at work retelling or editing or updating a narrative that explains or excuses why they have spent their time on earth as they have.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“At the same time there was something delicate in his face, almost childlike, cosseted, something I couldn’t name but today I know is simply a trait of the upper crust, who are pampered their entire lives.”
― Szczepan Twardoch, The King of Warsaw

“she wore exactly the sort of high heels with red soles Melania Trump favored when visiting prisons for toddlers.”
― Katie Crouch, Embassy Wife

“Mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain re-creates the sensory experiences of living creatures, of all people and even sometimes animals; if I see it I feel it, and for just a moment I am them, we are one and their pain or pleasure is my own. It can seem like magic and for a long time I thought it was, but really it’s not so far removed from how other brains behave: the physiological response to witnessing someone’s pain is a cringe, a recoil, a wince. We are hardwired for empathy.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?”
― Ray Gwyn Smith, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Elected officials who believe their own political survival is more important than anything else threaten the survival of our republic, no matter what they tell themselves to justify their cowardice.”
― Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning

“Lead levels in American children and adults are seen to be declining rapidly, beginning in 1992. At the same time, the crime rate falls, the largest plunge in recorded history. Epidemiologists superimpose graphs of lead and crime over each other, the lines rising and falling in tandem so closely that a theory is born: the lead–crime hypothesis.[”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers