Peggy > Peggy's Quotes

“She had always been different, even when she tried not to be, unable to curb her curiosity which led her to read a great number of books. Her world was constantly expanding until she could no longer fit herself into the culture that was most important to her.”
― Susan Power, The Grass Dancer

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think--which is fundamentally a moral problem--must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”
― John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.”
― Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

“Understanding comes with life. As a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people - sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having sympathy for people. ”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“[P]erhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“Do work that matters. Vale la pena”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills, I shall be with you-”
― Rudolfo A. Anaya, Bless Me Ultima

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war."
Defeat is worse."
I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“We are defined not so much by what we're reading, as by what we're reading next.”
― Julia Keller

“Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in my own time. In the 1960s, while a hopeful vision of a just society arose again, countless poems and plays concerning politics and public life were written, read, and performed. But after the hope diminished and public life seemed less and less trustworthy, this subject was less in style.”
― Susan Griffin, What Her Body Thought

“Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.”
― Susan Griffin, What Her Body Thought

“The hope you feel when you are in love is not necessarily for anything in particular. Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible. And in the event of failure, it will be this taste of possibility that makes disillusion bitter.”
― Susan Griffin, What Her Body Thought

“God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail