Dawn > Dawn's Quotes

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
― Jim Harrison

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the third worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying "like" all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.”
― Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living

“Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.”
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

“I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. ”
― Amy Tan

“Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.
-An-mei”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”
― Blaise Pascal

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
― Blaise Pascal, De l'art de persuader

“It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.”
― Blaise Pascal

“They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
― George Washington

“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
― John Adams

“(on fox news).... it's like watching a Disney movie about the news.”
― Stephen Colbert

“Twenty-two astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state
that makes people want to flee the Earth?"

- Stephen Colbert to Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones,
"The Colbert Report," November 3, 2005”
― Stephen Colbert

“Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. ”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“He was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents -by their mothers especially- raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.”
― Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

“„I don't think you put the swear word in the right place, Grandpa,” Teddy says. When Dad first came here, my boys would look shocked whenever Dad went Old-Faithful-profane, and I began to wonder if Lisa and I shouldn't swear more so Franklin and Teddy weren't so put off by curse words.”
― Jess Walter, The Financial Lives of the Poets

“To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree by the river of truth, and tell the whole world 'No, You Move.”
― J. Michael Straczynski