Jen Watkins > Jen's Quotes

“...we sang in church "Tata Nzolo"! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandry.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Nim unwrapped a loaf of fresh dilled rye bread and opened a crock of trout mousse. He slathered up a big slice and handed it to me. [...] We had thinly sliced veal smothered in kumquat sauce, fresh spinach with pine nuts, and fat red beefsteak tomatoes (impossibly rare at this time of year) broiled and stuffed with lemon apple sauce. The wide, fan-shaped mushrooms were sauteed lightly and served as a side dish. The main course was followed by a salad of red and green baby lettuce with dandelion greens and toasted hazelnuts.”
― Katherine Neville, The Eight

“...much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.”
― Sebastian Junger, War

“Human beings appear to be sufficiently selfish and calculating to be capable of indefinitely greater harmony and social homeostasis. This statement is not self-contradictory. True selfishness, if obedient to the other constraints of mammalian biology, is the key to a more nearly perfect social contract.”
― Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.”
― David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Literature could turn you into an asshole: he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.”
― Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?”
― Neil Gaiman

“She had not eaten supper and remembered the chicken and salad and wondered where Ervin was and imagined him in a nice restaurant, being pleasant with the waitress in a very low-key way, letting on nothing, a felon in flight, a murderer of possibilities, a their of happiness, a man guilty of so much, yet never standing trial for anything.”
― Lawrence Naumoff, The Night of the Weeping Women

“In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you.”
― Warren Buffet

“You start admiring someone who's famous for actually doing something---imagine that---and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend my own time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine.”
― Tana French, Faithful Place

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“Service is one of life's great joys. It's a privilege to be in service. It's a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. As long as you give yourself to it. You don't need to worry about anything but doing that job well, and the satisfaction, when you do, is very beautiful.”
― Messud, Claire

“Marriage is difficult, perhaps the most difficult thing you can ever do, besides being a parent, but I think these two fine young people are up to the challenge. Here are two steady, responsible people who, I believe, understand the dire commitment they are about to make and will choose to keep that commitment. Because it turns out to be a choice, commitment-not some done deal. When you leave the alter tomorrow, there will still be a lifetime of choice and temptation and doubt and uncertainty in front of you. I didn't know that at my wedding. Getting married doesn't change you. Marriage changes you.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“All he asked of her was basic civility and an ounce of propriety, but she was like one of her sea creatures, goaded by the slightest disturbance into puffing up and flashing warning colors.”
― shipstead, maggie

“There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene.”
― Liane Moriarty, Three Wishes

“the secret of happy marriage: not honesty, not forgiveness, but acceptance that is a kind of respect for the other's right to make mistakes.”
― Alice LaPlante, Turn of Mind

“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.”
― Joseph Campbell

“She used to say we are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and that a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration—we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“But Arthur, there is hope.' The great author quietly says: 'We are that fraction of old magic that remains.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost