E. seaberg > E.'s Quotes

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough, to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.”
― Sylvia Ashton-Warner

“Tenderness and Rot

Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.

No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.

One is not
two countries.
One is not meat
corrupting.

It is important
to stay sweet
and loving.”
― Kay Ryan

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“As death approaches me, I regret this most, Pilgrim--aside from my loss of you. I regret that I blamed, so often, others--for faults and problems of my own making. And, if not of my own making, certainly of my own tolerance. That men could not love men--or women, women--that poverty was the fault and responsibility of the poverty-stricken (how can I have thought so!)--and that 'good' was something that could be decreed by governments, as if by creating laws we could establish the boundaries of someone else's needs and joys and confidence. How dare we decree what is 'good' for others when for us it has been a gift!'

Sybil Quartermaine
Hôtel Baur au Lac
Zürich
14th May 1912”
― Findley Timothy

“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.”
― Claire Keegan

“To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?”
― Don Marquis

“Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.”
― Don Marquis

“The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their mustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Master

“I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.”
― Elinor Wylie

“All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people's point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to every one who supported a better case than he.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, “I think I will go to my grave now,” and had left the room.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“This morning, with her, having coffee”
― Johnny Cash

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or Man of the Year--something can always go wrong. You go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help-- and watch him fly. Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else--that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here... you're on your own.”
― M. Emmett Walsh

“But Mrs. Brockington, old, alone, almost crippled by rheumatism, had faith and courage. She had more. She had a warm serenity, and when Ellen was with her, she almost had it too. For goodness is catching. Mrs. Brockington was further on the road Ellen wanted to travel, and because Mrs. Brockington had got there, Ellen felt she might get there too.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance

“It turns out that trust is in fact earned in the smallest of moments. It is earned not through heroic deeds, or even highly visible actions, but through paying attention, listening, and gestures of genuine care and connection.”
― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

“People don’t change, they only get better at hiding themselves.”
― Alec Hutson, The Shadows of Dust

“The word freedom is hypocritical when spoken by the people who create the conditions that leave us sick and powerless. If our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree.”
― Timothy Snyder, Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary

“As long as people think poverty is the problem,” Ganz explained, “they’re missing the whole point. Poverty is evidence of a problem; it’s not the source of the problem. They’re all based on the weakening of collective institutions—the decline of labor, of common interests. The core question is not about poverty, it’s really about democracy. The galloping poverty in the United States is evidence of a retreat from democratic beliefs and practices.”
― Sasha Abramsky, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives