Nyambura > Nyambura's Quotes

“Don't wreck a sublime chocolate experience by feeling guilty.
Chocolate isn't like premarital sex. It will not make you pregnant.
And it always feels good.”
― Lora Brody

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.”
― Julia Child

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“My alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude.”
― Warsan Shire

“Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”
― Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”
― Neil Postman

“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“So I deal in straight-up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love

“Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn’t mean that you’re lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.”
― Sophie Kinsella, The Undomestic Goddess

“We are surrounded by story.”
― Alice McDermott

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”
― Toni Morrison

“Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?

A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.”
― Colson Whitehead