Lizzy > Lizzy's Quotes

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“But even before she got to college, Ann's thinking had become to change. She could no longer see herself working for the system. The system was corrupt through and through, she said, and you could not be a part of it without becoming corrupt yourself. So it was goodbye to that dream, as it was goodbye to "Dooley" and goodbye to horses. Oh, she would always love horses, she said, but equestrianism was on that growing list of things (along with tennis, weddings, monogamy, and cocktail parties) that she now called bourgeois affectations. (Sometimes she said, "That is such a B.A.," for short.)”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“It all sounds much crazier now than it did at the time, but even back then I wasn't sure how Ann could possibly believe all this - though I never doubted she was in earnest. She was never not in earnest. And there was no touch of the hypocrite about her.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“I did not yet know that, contrary to youth's sense of itself as tolerant, freethinking, and egalitarian, it is more often stubbornly critical and judgmental, priggish and snobbish. I would find these faults much later (glaring) in my son and daughter and their friends. But at that age myself, I did not see how we truly were, nor did I put together that these faults were often worst in those with the strongest political opinions.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“She said, "I wish I had been born poor." ("I wish I'd been born an Indian" - Robert Kennedy.) The ideal would have been to be born poor and black. But the counterculture was full of people in the grip of the same fantasy, with some - from street fighters to rock stars to flower children - even starting to believe they were black.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“[Ann] didn't approve of the contributions her parents made to large cultural institutions like the Lincoln Center...The Draytons were also big givers to programs to save American wildlife and wilderness. "Because animals and trees are more important than people?" their daughter fumed. To be fair, her parents did, through their church, give to Connecticut's poor. But Ann was not appeased, not when "they could give so much more." When I learned that what the Draytons did give altogether to various charities each year amounted to many times the cost of our entire college tuition, I was speechless. So they were sharing their wealth, weren't they, in a pretty big way? So they couldn't really be called bloodsucking parasites?

Ann set me straight. "Most of that money is tax deductible, don't forget. Do you think they would give a penny if it weren't?" I didn't know. But from the way Ann talked, you would have through her mother had stolen the money she spent on clothes and antiques from welfare mothers and the North Vietnamese.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I cut the wood however I like, but it's the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn't just your memory that makes you who you are. There's something in the grain of the mind.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Worthing Saga

“It huddled on the edge of a dead, dirty lake, fed by a river best known for burning; it was built on a river whose very name meant sadness: Chagrin. Which then gave its name to everything, pockets of agony scattered throughout the city, buried like veins of dismay: Chagrin Falls, Chagrin Boulevard, Chagrin Reservation. Chagrin Real Estate. Chagrin Auto Body. Chagrin reproducing and proliferating, as if they would ever run short. The Mistake on the Lake, people called it sometimes, and to Lexie, as to her siblings and friends, Cleveland was something to be escaped.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan. They were not allowed to be angry and articulate and powerful. And possibly right, Mr. Richardson thought uneasily.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she’d worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she’d set her down, Pearl would cry. There’d scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother’s leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there was something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia’s in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia’s arm pinned beneath Pearl’s head, or Pearl’s legs thrown across Mia’s belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Even the two boulders in the backyard sometimes turned to silver in the early morning sunlight. In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

Only her brother, Warren, seemed to understand the hidden layer she saw in things, but then they had always had an understanding, since before he had been born.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“His job was to make losses feel smaller. But the students never turned their C-minuses into Bs; new funding never materialized. You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Go home, Sean. Go plant some flowers and mow your grass. And maybe hatch a couple more kids."
"You sound like Colleen. That's what she wants."
"It's what we all want. Some of us just don't know it yet.”
― Jeff Shaara, The Frozen Hours

“Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money—unless you were married to it.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“During the years he was never sick, except of course for the chronic indigestion which was universal, and still is, with men who live alone, cook for themselves, and eat in solitude.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result, naturally, was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink.
Once when he was very ill Samuel asked, "Liza, couldn't I have a glass of whisky to ease me?"
She set her little hard chin. "Would you go to the throne of God with liquor on your breath? You would not!" she said.
Samuel rolled over on his side and went about his illness without ease.
When Liza was about seventy her elimination slowed up and the doctor told her to take a tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath. She always took the wine in a tablespoon, it was always medicine, but after a time she was doing over a quart a day and she was a much more relaxed and happy woman.”
― john steinbeck, East of Eden

“One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest.
In King City, Dr. Tilson felt him over. The doctor grew more testy with his overworked years.
"You sprained your back."
"That I did," said Samuel.
"And you drove all the way in to have me tell you that you sprained your back and charge you two dollars?"
"Here's your two dollars."
"And you want to know what to do about it?"
"Sure I do."
"Don't sprain it any more. Now tak your money back. You're not a fool, Samuel, unless you're getting childish."
"But it hurts."
"Of course it hurts. How would you know it was strained if it didn't?"
Samuel laughed. "You're good for me," he said. "You're more than two dollars good for me. Keep the money."
The doctor looked closely at him. "I think you're telling the truth, Samuel. I'll keep the money.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Samuel," she said, "you're the most contentious man this world has ever seen."
"Yes, Mother."
"Don't agree with me all the time. It hints of insincerity. Speak up for yourself.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“A miracle occurred when the infant
Was first laid in her arms.
She was transformed from a woman
Into a goddess known as “mother.”

She thought she’d known
The depths of love.
She thought she’d seen
The heights of success.
She thought she’d experienced
That which is true joy.
But nothing compared to this.

All else faded when her baby
Drew its first breath,
And she became a co-creator with God.”
― Suzy Toronto

“Tink dreamed of sea dragons and pie. Leeli dreamed of sea dragons and dogs. Janner dreamed of sea dragons and his father.”
― Andrew Peterson, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness

“in the mind of a boy, a warning isn’t much different from an invitation.”
― Andrew Peterson, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness

“When stress becomes a habit mentally, emotionally, and physically, a default setting on our inner dial, then it becomes “normal” and we no longer notice its presence. But the stress is still there, and it affects how we perceive, feel, and react to events in our lives. And stress is the major cause of anxiety.”
― J.P. Moreland, Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Peace

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
― James Madison

“But a woman raising her children is not only shaping the next generation, she is also shaping little humans who are going to live forever. The souls she gave birth to are immortal. Immortal. And somehow, our culture looks at a woman who treats that as if it might be an important task and says, “It’s a shame she’s wasting herself. She could be doing something important—like filing paperwork for insurance claims.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“say that you were a woman living on a farm at the turn of the last century. You have a lot of kids and not a lot of money. Winter’s coming, and you’ve got to feed them all the way through it. When do you start planning? The split minute you get through the last winter, that’s when. You pull out the seeds you saved from last year’s crop, you start your seeds, you plant your garden (and no, you can’t rent a rototiller, so you probably have to fuss around with a hoe or a horse and plow or something). And don’t forget that if that garden is going to feed the family it’s going to have to be a rather massive—cute container gardening or interesting Pinterest-worthy novelty gardens would not cut it. You tend it all summer, and you harvest. You can, you dry, you preserve. You fill your root cellar and hopefully by midway through autumn you can stand back and survey the fruit of all that labor, grateful that it all came together and secure in the knowledge that you have supplied your family with what they need. Now compare that feeling with grabbing a can of beans at the store and feeling happy that you remembered to do that so there’s some green on your kids’ plates tonight. It’s much easier, yes . . . but not quite the same in terms of satisfaction in a job well done.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Sorrow is the price of love in a world where nothing lasts. Isn’t it?”
He smiled back at her fondly. “Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.”
“Without love and sorrow we’re just objects in space,” said Molly.
Winter was surprised by a surge of emotion. He pressed his lips together.”
― Andrew Klavan, A Strange Habit of Mind