Kelley > Kelley's Quotes

“Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“    “But I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.” —Chris Hedges”
― Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water

“It's all about having a thread that links your years. To have another living person who just knows you. Someone who has seen you from childhood.”
― Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water

“Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire

“She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight" Sonata.

She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“The same three non-Muslims show up to our open house every year. They get serenaded as though they're royalty because we get to post "Mosque Opens Door to Greater Community, and THEY CAME!”
― S.K. Ali, Saints and Misfits

“When all is said and done I think the story tells us that hope is the heroes domain, not the fools. Because we dare to hope, even when doing so might undo us. We leave the worlds we create behind us, swirling in our wakes, eternal and effervescent with the beauty of our aspirations.”
― Daniel James Brown, The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride

“There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“...I came to see that there was something liberating about failure and humiliation.

Life as I had known it had been destroyed so completely, so publicly, that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free. I didn't have expectations anymore, and no one seemed to expect anything from me. I believed that nothing short of a speeding car could kill me. I knew there was nothing I couldn't give up.”
― Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“Fortunately, Jesus doesn't need all white people to get onboard before justice and reconciliation can be achieved. For me, this is freedom. Freedom to tell the truth. Freedom to create. Freedom to teach and write without burdening myself with the expectation that I can change anyone. It has also shifted my focus. Rather than making white people's reactions the linchpin that holds racial justice together, I am free to link arms with those who are already being transformed. Because at no point in America's history did all white people come together to correct racial injustice. At no point did all white people decide chattel slavery should end. At no point did all white people decide we should listen to the freedom fighters, end segregation, and enact the right of Black Americans to vote. At no point have all white people gotten together and agreed to the equitable treatment of Black people. And yet, there has been change, over time, over generations, over history.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“i wondered if i would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself..”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“I pretended I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy I hide in my chest, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to notice that I rise each morning, seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise, and it is only because of this secret joy, God's love, in my chest.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“It doesn't really feel like driving when you don't know where you are going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“Past a certain age, they give up on the name games, which is regrettable for someone like me who loves anything that involves going around a circle and saying something about yourself. I wish there was a class where we could just keep going around the circle, around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“Such plants are "weeds" only to those who make a business of selling and applying chemicals.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible… except by getting off his back.”
― Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?

“For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears,”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“Yes, she thought, this is right. Old carrion bird, bringing your reek of death to me.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“She understood this new phenomenon of overabundance to be born of the arrival of yet more of her people in the land. There was a new imbalance, a strangeness unsustainable. Henceforth, there would be far too much in some directions and in others a wretched poverty.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“No, she said, for the blight of the english will come to this remoteness as well. It will spread into this land and infect this land and devour the people who were here first; it will slaughter them, diminish them. The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left, then they will eat themselves. I am not of them. I will not be.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“She had once believed that in the deepest reaches of everything was a nothing where men had planted god; but now she knew that deeper within that nothing was something else, something made of light and heat.

It was this light and heat that endured, that was everlasting. At the center was not nothing, no. Out of the light and the heat all goodness poured.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive, she understood. And if she could in fact rouse herself to healing, if she could chase away the vulture of death, she would not choose this life that was shown to her, though the beauties of the world were without limit and the grace given to encounter more of them would have been an astonishing gift. Though there was satisfaction in the work of her body and her hands, though mere survival was a triumph, she understood now that the long loneliness of such a life she would never choose for herself.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“Look at all the Eastern writers who've written great Western literature. Kazuo Ishiguro. You'd never guess that The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go were written by a Japanese guy. But I can't think of anyone who's ever done the reverse-- any Westerner who's written great Eastern literature. Well, maybe if we count Lawrence Durrell - does the Alexandria Quartet qualify as Eastern literature?"
"There is a very simple test," said Vikram. "Is it about bored, tired people having sex?"
"Yes," said the convert, surprised.
"Then it's western.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen