traci > traci's Quotes

“When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“F**k them is what I say. I hate those ebooks. They can not be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won't give a s**t.”
― Maurice Sendak

“If there's anything I'm proud of in my work--it's not that I draw better; there's so many better graphic artists than me--or that I write better, no. It's--and I'm not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty, to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious — and what is too often overlooked — is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.”
― Maurice Sendak

“I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them”
― Maurice Sendak

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
― Maurice Sendak

“If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”
― Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now

“I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Miss B. says, "It's a mama's faith what keeps her children right. I'm not talkin' 'bout the churchgoin' kind, neither. Miss Mabel's got faith in goodness. Tell me you can't help but believe in it too just by lookin' at her.”
― Ami McKay, The Birth House

“If women lose the right to say where and how they birth their children, then they will have lost something that’s as dear to life as breathing.”
― Ami McKay, The Birth House

“The biggest prison in the universe is caring about what other people think of you.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”
― Anne Herbert

“We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness;
We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbor.
We’ve built more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies than ever,
but have less communications;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These times are times of fast foods;
but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

--authorship unknown
from Sacred Economics”
― Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

“If women lose the right to say where and how they birth their children, then they will have lost something that's as dear to life as breathing.”
― Ami McKay, The Birth House

“I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.”
― Susan Fletcher

“We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine.”
― Susan Fletcher

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost