Telly > Telly's Quotes

“Anger is a wasted emotion.”
― Edwidge Danticat

“I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.”
― Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ”
― Ernest Gaines

“There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“For you see, the face of destiny or luck or god that gives us war also gives us other kinds of pain: the loss of health and youth; the loss of loved ones or of love; the fear that we will end our days alone. Some people suffer in peace the way others suffer in war. The special gift of that suffering, I have learned, is how to be strong while we are weak, how to be brave when we are afraid, how to be wise in the midst of confusion, and how to let go of that which we can no longer hold. In this way, anger can teach us forgiveness, hate can teach us love, and war can teach us peace.”
― Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace

“A government of fighters won't know how to lead, only create more war. You think bravery is measured in resistance.”
― Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze

“How many shots had to be fired to turn this child back to his home and anxious mother?”
― Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze

“When you are convinced that everything that happens is the will of God, what is there to do but wait until God has mercy?”
― Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze

“The rich think this land is theirs though they have never earned the right to call it theirs.”
― Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze

“We must not be anything other than what we are.”
― Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze

“The nature of love is to kill for it, or to die.”
― Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze

“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death, lest for forget, is the common lot.”
― Abraham Verghese

“You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Geography is destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.”
― Assotto Saint

“What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to Heaven.”
― Justin Torres

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Was it an accident that I saw Fiyero, I wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes, or is it just that world unwraps itself to you again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew?”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Love makes hunters of us all.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her~is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
― Dorothy Day

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
― Theodore Parker

“Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel