Mandy > Mandy's Quotes

“I am afraid to show you who I really am, because if I show you who I really am, you might not like it--and that's all I got.”
― Sabrina Ward Harrison, Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself

“Barefoot travel allows you to get the true feel of a place.”
― Sabrina Ward Harrison

“Nobody can discover the world for someone else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone. —Wendell Berry”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“home. I grow restless with the humdrum of small, ordinary life, but know it’s in those hours of sorting socks and vacuuming the car where most of life is meant to be lived.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Traveling means touching, tasting, smelling the world.”
― Tsh Oxenreider, At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe

“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”
― Alan Turing

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“Finding such a person makes everyone else appear so ordinary…and if anything happens to him, you’ve got nothing left but to return to the ordinary world, and a kind of isolation that never existed before.”
― Alan Turing

“As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Yet instead of being angry, he pities me. That's the worst part. Anger's solid, it has weight. You can beat your fists against it. Pity's a fog to become lost in.”
― Stuart Turton, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“The Plague Doctor claimed Blackheath was meant to rehabilitate us, but bars can’t build better men and misery can only break what goodness remains. This place pinches out the hope in people, and without that hope, what use is love or compassion or kindness?”
― Stuart Turton, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“That’s the beauty of corrupt men, you can always rely on them to be corrupt”
― Stuart Turton, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“I suddenly have the sense of taking part in a play in which everybody knows their lines but me.”
― Stuart Turton, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“And, yes, sadly, no one else can ever understand your loss. It belongs to you. It impacts only you. And guess what? They don’t need to understand.” Mimi paused. “But you do. You need to fully appreciate how this has changed you, so that you can indeed move on and live, but as this changed person, who might now want different things. Who might now want different people about them.”
― Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society

“Reading, she now understood, had been her own choice of rebellion.”
― Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society

“We love Jane Austen because her characters, as sparkling as they are, are no better and no worse than us. They’re so eminently, so completely, human. I, for one, find it greatly consoling that she had us all figured out.”
― Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society

“I always find it interesting how Jane Austen's fans are always romantics to some degree - when I swear she wrote those books with a goose quill dipped in venom.”
― Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society

“Jane Austen knew about money and power, too, Mimi reminded herself, in the specialness of her surroundings that night. Austin saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austin knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius - - a genius no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own - - she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast soley by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.”
― Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society

“The cross was not God’s invention—it was ours. The cross was an instrument of torture, a method of intimidation created by an empire that needed to keep its conquered cities in check. In all our need for an eye for an eye, I have to wonder sometimes if Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is an answer not to God’s wrath, but to ours. I have to wonder if God, having listened to us cry for blood, decided to offer his own. Perhaps Jesus hung on a cross to demonstrate the inevitable outcome of retributive justice in the face of an empire that used violence to expand, that survived only by placing societies under its oppressive heel. Jesus didn’t hold up a sword in response to a sword. He took the sword into His side, and in doing so, revealed our brutality for what it was.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“Brené Brown says that the opposite of faith is not doubt. Faith and doubt need each other. The opposite of faith is certainty,” Bradley said. “When I heard that, I realized, no wonder I was such a screwed-up Fundamentalist. But when I let the doubt just be there, my faith grew.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“You can know God intimately while acknowledging the mystery, even the absurdity, of such a notion. You can experience the proven neurological benefits of prayer even as you contemplate how science shows prayer's limitations. You can be part of the global body of people who follow God without turning off your brain or believing things that go against your conscience. You can read he Bible without having to brush off its ancient portrayal of science or its all-too-fruquent brutality.

And you can meet a risen Son of God named Jesus while wondering how such a thing could ever be true.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“That this network is complex explains much about our faith. It explains why people with higher activity in their frontal lobes will be drawn to apologetics or theology—they want to know how God works. On the other hand, people with higher activity in their limbic systems will know God through feelings and have little concern with rational justifications for God’s existence. They know God because they feel God. Either”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“I wasn't aware that words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Autumn leaves don't fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Unworthy boys make a lot of noise”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“A great blue heron is the color of gray mist reflecting in blue water.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.”
― Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer