J.J. > J.J.'s Quotes

“Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.”
― Anne Fortier, Juliet

“Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“A moment of consideration often prevents a thousand apologies”
― Kevin J. Anderson

“Hope can get you through anything.”
― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“He'd learned long ago: perfection isn't what families are all about.”
― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot."

[Baffled at a Bookcase (London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]”
― Alan Bennett

“As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

No ... eight days a week.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“According to a recent article in the New York Times, few parents expose their children to those works in the original these days, and some of their reasons make sense. Who wants children growing up with the idea that stepmothers are wicked, ugly people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and princesses are all white? At the same time, I worry about children who grow up thinking that every story has a happy ending and no one gets permanently hurt along the way.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night

“Following Jesus isn’t something you can do at night where no one notices. It’s a twenty-four-hour-a-day commitment that will interfere with your life. That’s not the small print—that’s a guarantee.”
― Kyle Idleman

“A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”
― John Hodgman, More Information Than You Require

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender, and other variables. In rejecting the possibility of an objective reality and substituting the notions of perspective and positioning for the idea of truth, postmodernism enshrined the principle of subjectivity.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Jumping ahead to the victories means skipping the hard but necessary work of examining what went wrong with race and the church.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“When the things you can buy online matter more to you than the things you can do in your neighbourhood; when you communicate with social media friends you never meet more than your real friends; when your notion of public space is confined to the screen in your hand: all this removes the sinew of citizenship”
― Matthew d'Ancona, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back

“Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Love is the strongest kind of army because it generates no resistance.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“Edmund Burke argued that people who have never looked backward to their ancestors will not be able to look forward and plan for the future. People who look backward to see the heroism and the struggle that came before see themselves as debtors who owe something, who have some obligation to pay it forward.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“The hard part of intellectual life is separating what is true from what will get you liked.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“The universe is alive and connected, these moments tell us. There are dimensions of existence you never could have imagined before. Quantum particles inexplicably flip together, even though they are separated by vast differences of time and space. Somehow the world is alive and communicating with itself. There is some interconnecting animating force, and we are awash in that force, which we with our paltry vocabulary call love. The”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“She just wasn’t sure she had yet been to the place she was homesick for.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out—blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true?”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“while speaking up against these explicitly racist actions is critical, we must also be careful not to use them to keep ourselves on the “good” side of a false binary.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused.”
― Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

“Nothing is quite so dangerous as a religious fanatic who thinks he’s doing the Lord’s will.”
― Jerry Mitchell, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era