Julia > Julia's Quotes

“So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme. ”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
― Coco Chanel

“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.”
― Francesco Petrarca

“Our inability to think beyond our own species, or to be able to co-habit with other life forms in what is patently a massive collaborative quest for survival, is surely a malady that pervades the human soul.”
― Lawrence Anthony

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw