Lauren > Lauren's Quotes

“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.”
― Jane Austen

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“Foes and false friends are all around me, Lord Davos. They infest my city like roaches, and at night I feel them crawling over me.” The fat man’s fingers coiled into a fist, and all his chins trembled. “My son Wendel came to the Twins a guest. He ate Lord Walder’s bread and salt, and hung his sword upon the wall to feast with his friends. And they murdered him. Murdered, I say, and may the Freys choke upon their fables. I drink with Jared, jape with Symond, promise Rhaegar the hand of my own beloved granddaughter…but never think that means I have forgotten. The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer’s farce is almost done. My son is home.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“I am Cersei of House Lannister, a lion of the Rock, the rightful queen of these Seven Kingdoms, trueborn daughter of Tywin Lannister. And hair grows back.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

“And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“Lying there, interrogated by the governor of Virginia, Brown said: “You had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. . . . You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled,—this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“Crack seemed to have a different hold on folks than liquor did. Drunks would sober up and come to their senses in the morning. But once a crackhead got hooked all they did was chase that high. Even if it meant selling everything they owned for a hit: wedding rings, household appliances, their kids’ clothes. Anything that had been important didn’t matter anymore.”
― Patricia Williams, Rabbit: A Memoir

“Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“It is no surprise that the people trying so frantically to extend our lifespans are almost entirely rich, white men. Men who have lived lives of systematic privilege, and believe that privilege should extend indefinitely.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Was he right? It felt like a question that really needed answering because it didn't seem to be crossing any of our minds to wonder whether the person we had just shamed was okay or in ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“Gender bias is so steeped in the culture, their results implied, that women were themselves discriminating against other women.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Imbalance in the sciences is at least partly because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often don’t face.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Study after study has shown almost all behavioral and psychological differences between the sexes to be small or nonexistent. Cambridge University psychologist Melissa Hines and others have repeatedly demonstrated that boys and girls have little, if any, noticeable gaps between them when it comes to fine motor skills, spatial visualization, mathematics ability, and verbal fluency.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being. This is my forty-year-old conviction. I am now”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people’s anomalous amygdalae.”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“TV is just troubled people being booed these days.”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“What is love, Poori?” Savitha said. “What is love if not a hunger?”
― Shobha Rao, Girls Burn Brighter

“I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect. ”
― Fred Rogers

“Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature. They lead “still” lives, waiting.’ ‘Waiting for what?’ ‘Waiting for someone to save them. Expecting someone to save them or at least protect them from the big, bad world. The thing is no one else can save them because the problem is theirs and so is the solution. Only they can get out of it.”
― Louise Penny, Still Life

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune