Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“Instead of raising children who turn out okay despite their childhood, let’s raise children who turn out extraordinary because of their childhood.” —L. R. KNOST”
― Ainsley Arment, The Call of the Wild and Free: Reclaiming Wonder in Your Child's Education

“In his book How Children Succeed, Paul Tough wrote, “Babies whose parents responded readily and fully to their cries in the first months of life were, at one year, more independent and intrepid than babies whose parents had ignored their cries. In preschool, the pattern continued—the children whose parents had responded most sensitively to their emotional needs as infants were the most self-reliant. Warm, sensitive parental care, [the study] contended, created a ‘secure base’ from which a child could explore the world.”5”
― Ainsley Arment, The Call of the Wild and Free: Reclaiming Wonder in Your Child's Education

“But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn’t be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn’t be God. There’s more to everything than we can know.”
― Min Jin Lee

“Unfortunately, our brains don’t know the difference between regular sweeteners (like honey or sugar) and zero-calorie/artificial sweeteners (such as stevia, aspartame, or sucralose) or flavors from actual food (such as strawberries or chocolate) and zero-calorie-added flavors (including both natural and artificial food-like flavors). Do you remember the saying, “You can’t fool Mother Nature”? Well, these artificial sweeteners and added flavors actually are fooling Mother Nature, and it has definite consequences for our bodies. Our brains don’t understand that we have figured out how to make something that tastes like food but actually isn’t food, so they prepare for the calories … that never come.”
― Gin Stephens, Fast. Feast. Repeat.: The Comprehensive Guide to Delay, Don't Deny® Intermittent Fasting--Including the 28-Day FAST Start

“What really got me about the worry research is that those of us with a tendency to worry believe it is helpful for coping (it is not), believe it is uncontrollable (which means we don’t try to stop worrying), and try to suppress worry thoughts (which actually strengthens and reinforces worry). I’m not suggesting that we worry about worry, but it’s helpful to recognize that worrying is not a helpful coping mechanism, that we absolutely can learn how to control it, and that rather than suppressing worry, we need to dig into and address the emotion driving the thinking.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain—that the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts; it’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run an economy, but it is no way to run a life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, and numb. Numbness keeps us from becoming. This is why every great spiritual teacher tells us the same story about humanity and pain: Don’t avoid it. You need it to evolve, to become. And you are here to become.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“Yes, everyone you love would be uncomfortable for a long while, maybe. What is better: uncomfortable truth or comfortable lies? Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is an unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“When Chase was a freshman in high school, I asked him to take a walk with me. As we made our way down our driveway and to the sidewalk, I turned to my bright, beautiful boy and said, “I make a lot of mistakes parenting you. But I only know they are mistakes in retrospect. I’ve never made a decision for you that I know, in real time, is wrong for you. Until now. I know I’m not doing right by you—letting you keep that phone in your life. I know that if I took it away, you’d be more content again. You’d be present. You might have less contact with all your peers, but you’d have more real connection with your friends. You’d probably start reading again, and you’d live inside that beautiful brain and heart of yours instead of the cyberworld. We’d waste less of our precious time together. “I know this. I know what I need to do for you, and I’m not doing it. I think it’s because all of your friends have phones and I don’t want you to have to be different. The ‘But everybody’s doing it’ reason. But then I think about how it’s not all that unusual for everybody to be doing something that we later find out is addictive and deadly. Like smoking; everybody was doing that a couple decades ago.” Chase was quiet for a while. We kept walking. Then he said, “I read this thing that said that kids are getting more depressed and stressed than ever because of phones. It also said we can’t talk to each other as well. I notice those things about myself sometimes lately. I also read that Ed Sheeran gave up his phone.” “Why do you imagine he did that?” “He said he wants to create things instead of looking at things other people create, and he wants to see the world through his own eyes instead of through a screen. I think I’d probably be happier without my phone. Sometimes I feel like I have to check it, like it controls me. It’s like a job I don’t want or get paid for or anything. It feels stressful sometimes.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created. When she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers. When she finally understands that it is not her duty to convince everyone on her island to accept and respect her.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“We must decide that admitting to being poisoned by racism is not a moral failing—but denying we have poison in us certainly is.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“Everybody owes it to herself, to her people, to the world, to examine what she’s been taught to believe, especially if she’s going to choose beliefs that condemn others. She has to ask herself questions like “Who benefits from me believing this?”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. —Archbishop Desmond Tutu When I started looking upstream, I learned that where there is great suffering, there is often great profit. Now when I encounter someone who is struggling to stay afloat, I know to first ask, “How can I help you right now?” Then, when she is safe and dry, to ask, “What institution or person is benefiting from your suffering?” Every philanthropist, if she is paying attention, eventually becomes an activist. If we do not, we risk becoming codependent with power—saving the system’s victims while the system collects the profits, then pats us on the head for our service. We become injustice’s foot soldiers.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks. They steal, they torture people, they make these insane rules and set the tone.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“If we always approach children with the goal of correcting them or getting them to follow our agenda, at some point they’re not going to see any reason to cooperate, or even interact with us at all. We may need to take some time to reconnect. To do something together “just for the fun of it.”
― Joanna Faber, How to Talk When Kids Won't Listen: Whining, Fighting, Meltdowns, Defiance, and Other Challenges of Childhood

“It’s hard for a child to accept superlatives like “great” and “excellent,” when they don’t match his own perception. Often such praise causes him to focus on his weaknesses instead of his strengths. And if a child does accept our proud parental pronouncements at face value, it might cause other problems down the line. We’re not giving him a realistic picture of his abilities. Where can you go from “great” and “excellent”? Why would you put in the hard work to improve? We need an alternative to the unsupported superlative!”
― Joanna Faber, How to Talk When Kids Won't Listen: Whining, Fighting, Meltdowns, Defiance, and Other Challenges of Childhood

“Great! Perfect! Fantastic! Beautiful! Good job! This kind of praise is strangely too much and too little at the same time. Too much because these superlatives don’t come across as authentic. Too little because they can feel generic and dismissive. Did Dad really look at it? Does he like it or is he just saying that? It’s easier to say “good job” than it is to pay close attention to something a child is showing us. Often kids will respond, “But do you really like it?” What can a parent or teacher do instead that will satisfy a child’s need for recognition? You can take an extra minute to describe what you see. If you have another minute to spare, you can even ask a question to show your interest and give your child an opportunity to elaborate. It can be enormously gratifying to a child when an adult takes the time and effort to notice the details of her accomplishment. It can even inspire her to greater heights.”
― Joanna Faber, How to Talk When Kids Won't Listen: Whining, Fighting, Meltdowns, Defiance, and Other Challenges of Childhood

“That’s the whole game, you know? Eat up the land, then keep going. Someday they gonna run out of land, and I don’t know what they’ll do then.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“You know that you will never truly be free of the grief. You know that it is something you must learn to live with, something you manage. You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it’s more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can’t simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves

“For years now people have said to you, “May his memory be a blessing.” You realize, finally, that’s exactly what it is. You are happier to have known him than you are sad to have lost him. You wonder if grief is less chronic than you think. If remission can last for years.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves

“Men and women are both human beings. And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational systems, and choosers of our behaviors. In short, the reduction of women to something less than men, and the elevation of men to something more than women, is not biological: it’s cultural. And it starts with two words: pink and blue. Everything skyrockets out of control from there.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“To boil it down to its bare essentials, golf is a game of considerable skill, elitism, white supremacy and sexism all wrapped up in a genteel walk, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to learn, so early in life, that having a decent level of skill means fuck-all in life if you’re a girl, and especially so if you’re of the fat and poor variety.[”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“How can a man so drunk on the power of being a doctor have such a devastatingly ignorant understanding of the insidious nature of depression? Even a rude little girl like me knows that when you are depressed you lose access to any memory of ever feeling any other way, you simply accept the depressed state as eternal and immutable.”
― Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette

“Early in the crisis, many right-wing figures, including President Trump, used traffic deaths—some 37,000 annually—to make the case that some amount of loss of life is an acceptable price to pay for a strong economy. (In the case of the pandemic, we’re talking truly staggering figures.) It was a bad analogy in a lot of ways, but it helped emphasize the strange tolerance we have in our culture for traffic deaths and how they can desensitize us to other forms of cruelty and injustice.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Had eleven people been shot by a mass shooter in Phoenix, it would have made national news. By contrast, routine pedestrian deaths do not inspire furious press conferences or congressional hearings. Three of that week’s victims were never even identified by name in the press. Nevertheless, their deaths represent an alarming—and until very recently, largely unexplained—trend.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Pedestrian victims also contend with an American culture of complacency around traffic deaths more generally. The general acceptance of these deaths as tragic but inevitable has headed off the necessary work of recognizing solutions and finding the will to implement them, even as the numbers have soared.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Twenty-two US states have amended their constitutions to forbid any gasoline tax revenues at all from being spent on sidewalks.37 Many of these laws were passed in the 1960s with the financial backing of highway construction lobbyists.38 At the federal level, bicyclists and pedestrians now represent about one in five traffic deaths, but they receive less than 1.5 percent of all federal infrastructure funding.39 Increasing political polarization may also play a role. Just as the pedestrian death crisis was beginning to present itself in 2012, and in an era of loud and renewed interest in active transportation, the Republican-led US Congress substantially reduced federal funding support for walking and biking programs. In addition, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the newly regulation-averse US Department of Transportation slow-walked reforms that could have, for the first time, made automakers more accountable for their design impacts on pedestrian safety.”
― Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

“Who gets to decide what ‘happiness’ is?” would be one question we might ask, given that some people, like me, are normal and well-adjusted, and other people put pineapple on pizza and enjoy listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“But there’s a larger question here, which is whether shame is a productive way to achieve an ethical outcome. For one thing, when people are shamed, they may not want to change their behavior—often, their defenses go up and they dig in their heels, which can have the opposite effect that we want it to have.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“In fact, even with good intentions and level heads, if we give in to our lesser instincts too often there’s a far more likely outcome than “we become black market weapons dealers.” It’s simply that we become selfish. We start to believe that our own “right” to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, is more important than anything else, and thus our sense of morality concerns only our own happiness or pain. We become… Ayn Rand.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question