Avery Santin > Avery's Quotes

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough?”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“Om Namah Shivaya, meaning,
I honor the divinity that resides within me.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Things are rough all over.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“The lift of her heart she'd felt on the outcrop she now felt again, and it wasn't just love. She'd felt love before, known its depths when her mother died.
This was something rarer. Happiness, Laurel thought, that must be what this is.”
― Ron Rash, The Cove

“To say that I enjoyed writing... is like saying I enjoy having fingers and toes. It's difficult to imagine life without them.”
― Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Oh no," I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then "oh no" is apparently that song's chorus, the words we always return to.”
― Brock Clarke, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

“Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they're the pinnacle of evolution?”
― Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle

“Holding me in his arms, the way that poems hold clauses.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Love. It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“It hurts to want it all, so many things that can't coexist within the same life.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“But why, why, why can't people just say what they mean?”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project

“There are as many sides to the truth as people telling the story.”
― Crystal Smith Paul, Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them--and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Don't be so sure that your version of reality is better because it's newer.”
― Bill McKibben, Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance

“We all need to be reminded that democracy isn't just voting for the president every four years and then trusting him to fix things. Democracy is about getting together with your community to think together about your future.”
― Bill McKibben, Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance