Laurie > Laurie's Quotes

“I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity. ”
― Stephen Jay Gould (Dinosaur in a Haystack)

“There is a significant moral difference between a person who commits a violent crime and a person who tries to cross a border illegally in order to put food on the family table. Such migrants may violate our laws against illicit entry, but if that's all they do they are trespassers, not criminals. They deserve to have their dignity respected.”
― Madeleine Albright, Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership

“Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious.”
― Michael Perry

“There are different ways of understanding the universe, and you learn nothing by running an experiment if a spell or a sculpture is what’s needed. And there are things we’ll never understand because we don’t have the time, or the right sorts of minds.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“Do you understand?” Lincoln asked him. “If you’re in a relationship with someone, if you let yourself be vulnerable, you can get hurt.” “I know.” Lincoln’s expression was dubious. But Sebastian did understand. He got it. If he was with Abby, if he let himself love her, and if, somehow, she loved him, she would have his heart in her hands, every day. He would be giving her power to wound him, to hurt him, to make him not want to live. To leach all the color from the world; to steal all the savor from food; to turn minutes to hours and hours to days and the rest of his life into a painfully slow slog to its inevitable end. He shook his head in confusion… and admiration. How had Lincoln done it? How did anyone? “It’s scary,” he finally said. “But worth it,” said Lincoln. “If it works, if you find your person, everything you suffer is worth it.”
― Jennifer Weiner, The Breakaway

“The house of Our Lady of Grackles was quiet and dull, and the things that people expected of her were clear-cut and not shrouded behind diplomatic words.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“Everything’s better if it comes from a long way away. That’s the secret,”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade