Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes

“Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The hell with virtue. I've figured out the mechanics of her dress.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“...every time you make a rule you take away a choice and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.”
― Marcus Buckingham, First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

“It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood--and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“But luck withered by conservative, tired, riskless living can be plumped up again--after all, it was only a bit thirsty for something to do.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“It's not that there is no small talk...It's that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end...Sensitive people...'enjoy small talk only after they've gone deep' says Strickland. 'When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect—something, after all, priceless.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The impetuous creature--a pirate--started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I think the root of embarrassment is feeling totally misunderstood, wanting to explain yourself over and over but knowing that you won't make much sense to anyone even if you do.”
― Alice Ozma, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared

“Never laugh at live dragons.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
― Edith Sitwell

“Strength is the capacity to break a Hershey bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.”
― Judith Viorst, Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader