Tamela > Tamela's Quotes

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.”
― May Sinclair

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously, and change the subject.”
― Catherine Goldhammer, Still Life With Chickens: Starting Over in a House by the Sea

“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”
― Jan Morris

“What we eat is an essential part of who we are and how we define ourselves.”
― Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“He seemed particularly insistent. I both did and didn’t want to be left alone at the house with my mother. There was an aching in my chest that surprised me, and my eyes were watering up against my will.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“Our eyes caught, and I saw her as she had been and would always be, a long-lost daughter of Mayflower histories, forever in motion, running from or toward an unutterable hideaway.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“much privilege leads to bad manners,”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere. But it’s a good place to be, I think. It’s like floating. From up above, you can see everything at once. It’s the only way how.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said “I love you” to each other. How they had said only “I miss you.” At the time, I hadn’t been able to figure out what this meant. But now it seemed clear: this was how they defined their love—by how deeply they missed each other when they were together. They felt the loss before it happened, and their love was defined by that loss. They hungered even as they ate, thirsted even as they drank. My mother once told me to live my life as if I were already dead. “Live each day as if you know it’s gonna be gone tomorrow,” she had said. That was how my parents loved each other, with a desperate, melancholy love, a fierce nostalgia for the present.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“Origins sure are powerful and sh*t. You can’t shake them.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice