Bethany > Bethany's Quotes

“This was a world where one became outdated before one’s time was up. An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly anymore. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren’t we always, first and foremost—woman? Wasn’t there strength in that, victory, clarity—in all the stages of a woman’s life?”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“I’d like political candidates to present their prep plans for the zombie apocalypse, or for the robot revolution, or for when the Internet becomes self-aware, because at least then the debates would be more interesting.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“the voices are so persuasive, you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. You know the voices aren’t talking into your ears, but they’re not exactly in your head either. They seem to call to you from another place that you’ve accidentally tapped into, like a cell phone pulling in a conversation in some foreign language—yet somehow you understand it. They linger there on the edge of your consciousness like the things you hear just as you’re waking up, before the dream collapses under the crushing weight of the real world. But what if the dream doesn’t go away when you wake up? And what if you lose the ability to tell the difference?”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“When the public allows itself to be fooled by a smooth-talking wannabe dictator, “what you get in the end,” Alice insisted, “is your Fuehrer, your Duce, your Rex.”
― Marc Peyser

“They now endure incessant cultural appropriation by a majority society in the United States that celebrates an idealized American Indian but ignores reservation life—the economic blight and marginalization of what are, in effect, national internment zones, exacerbated by federal inattention and mismanagement. In Indian country there are also thriving cultural traditions and creative genius, but these often receive little more recognition than the problems. —”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“She’d forgotten love could be like that, simple and easy and joyous. The love she felt for Anthony had deepened over the decades, and it had changed; life had thrown the pair of them challenges and love had adapted to meet them. Love had come to mean putting someone else first, sacrificing, keeping the patched-up ship from sinking in the storms.”
― Kate Morton, The Lake House

“A respectful dialogue with one’s opponent almost invariably goes further than a harangue outside his or her window. If you want to change someone’s mind, you must understand what need shapes his or her opinion. To prevail, you must first listen”
― Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World

“To say that a stay-at-home mom has betrayed her potential is no less absurd than to suggest that a woman who puts career first is somehow less a woman.”
― Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World

“You lose someone you love more than you love yourself, and you get a crash course in mortality. You lie awake night after night, wondering if you really believe in heaven and hell and finding all kinds of reasons to cling to faith, because you can’t bear to believe they aren’t out there somewhere, a few whispered words of a prayer away.”
― Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever

“It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“She didn’t have to do any of this. The victimization, the acceptance of bullshit, the leaving your heart in the hands of an asshole yet again. She could just decide not to.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising