Carla (There Might Be Cupcakes Podcast) > Carla's Quotes

“. . .three percent of all males are deemed to be antisocial and without conscience, while only one percent of females seem to lack compassion for others. But the icy manipulations of that one percent are utterly fascinating. No one can be crueler than a woman without a conscience.”
― Ann Rule, Empty Promises and Other True Cases

“I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.”
― David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

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

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.”
― Jim Henson, Favorite Songs From Jim Henson's Muppets

“The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children. ”
― Jim Henson

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“I ask not for any crown
But that which all may win;
Nor try to conquer any world
Except the one within.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.”
― Sue Grafton, A Is for Alibi

“Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Men

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”
― Billy Sunday, "Billy" Sunday, the man and his message: with his own words which have won thousands for Christ

“The more I like me, the less I want to pretend to be other people.”
― Jamie Lee Curtis

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket

“All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Well-read people are less likely to be evil.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope

“No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.”
― Lemony Snicket

“If you are a student you should always get a good nights sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means 'flunk'.”
― Lemony Snicket

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”
― Bill Bryson

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!' Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.”
― Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - evetually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you.”
― Bill Bryson (Introduction)

“Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away