kadma > kadma's Quotes

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”
― Robert Graves

“I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men—cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? I was going to say that perhaps women are born with a cooking gene until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world—who are given the fancy title of “chef”—are men.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?")”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I’ve become a bitter person and I’m resigned to that fact. I can’t change my circumstances, so why try to change who I’ve become as a result of them?”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I know focusing on myself won’t be easy. It will take continuous effort, time, and attention. It will mean working on my issues, facing them head-on instead of letting them serve as distractions or trying to pretend they’re less than they are. It will mean doing THE WORK. The soul-scraping introspection it takes to understand where bad habits and insecurities and self-sabotaging patterns come from and why, plus the motivation to challenge and change those bad habits and insecurities and self-sabotaging patterns even as they continue to get triggered over and over again by various life events.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“I'm trying every day to face myself. The results vary, but the attempts are consistent.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“Maybe when I have a slip, I can acknowledge how disappointing and frustrating it is without getting caught in the shame spiral. Without letting that spiral lead to more slips, and more slips, and more slips, until they’ve become a slide. Maybe now a slip can be, as Jeff says, just that. A slip.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died