Amy > Amy's Quotes

“Tears of grief are unique. They contain chemicals that aren't found in the more mundane droplets of moisture that bathe the eyes, as if our tears wash us free of some noxious cause of sorrow.”
― Carol Cassella, Oxygen

“Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

“All children should be loved, protected, nurtured --emotionally and intellectually-- respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.”
― Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.”
― Chris Bohjalian, Before You Know Kindness

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
― Margaret Mead

“It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.”
― Margaret Mead

“If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.”
― Margaret Mead

“It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly. ”
― Margaret Mead

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
― Gary Provost

“I am beginning to understand why I came here today. I needed to escape the cluttered struggles of everyday life, the battles born of a false sense of consequence. I spend so much time waving a sword in the air; I am exhausted and want to lay my weapon down. Like Don Quixote, I have been tilting at windmills. - Essay: Walden, Revisited”
― Faye Rapoport DesPres, Message From a Blue Jay - Love Loss and One Writer's Journey Home

“Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”
― Tara Westover , Educated

“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: "It is a subject on which nothing final can be known." The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“My companions could make observations. Sloane could generate relevant statistics. If there'd been witness testimony, Michael could have told us who was exhibiting signs of guilt. But here, now, looking at the pictures, this was my domain. I would have to backtrack to explain how I knew, to figure out how I knew -- but I was certain.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Naturals

“Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you've hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you've seen the worst and the best-- well, that sort of love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.”
― Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot

“Honor is the presence of God in man.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell