Tricia > Tricia's Quotes

“Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“I licked it so it’s mine’ isn’t a thing in dating.”
― Onley James, Psycho

“When I look around the church and none of the depictions of angels or Jesus or Mary, not one of the disciples look like me: morenita and big and angry. When I’m told to have faith in the father the son in men​and men are the first ones to make me feel so small.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“Just because your father's present, doesn't mean he isn't absent.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“He is not elegant enough for a sonnett, too well-thought-out for a free write, taking too much space in my thoughts to ever be a haiku.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“Sometimes I think," she said slowly, "that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn't make it past noon.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Same when Stephanie doesn’t turn on the light over the stove to cook, or leaves the light in her bathroom on, or leaves cabinet or closet doors wide open, or doesn’t tighten the lids all the way, all of which the annoyance regards as, if not an obvious sign of sociopathy, indication of some genuine sketchiness.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“I suspect this statue-adorning impulse, whether or not we know who the public figure is, is evidence, more evidence, that our inclination, our nature, is to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make of the world a bouquet. Or a vase.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“A delight I wish to now imagine and even impose, given that beneficent dictatorship [of one’s own life, anyway] is a delight, all new statues must have in their hands flowers or shovels or babies or seedlings or chinchillas—we could go on like this for a while. But never again—never ever—guns.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“I am always pretending, always wearing costumes but never just clothes.”
― Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
― Albert Einstein

“To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”
― Voltaire

“I love you." His voice shook the tiniest amount, making my heart swell too big for my chest. "More than anything in this universe. But you can't tell anyone.”
― Lily Mayne, Soul Eater

“I hesitated. I was fairly sure I knew what Danny’s response would be to ‘Kill everyone,’ but it really was the most efficient option.”
― Lily Mayne, Wyn

“Does anything scare you?
The stupidity of mankind.”
― Lily Mayne, A Collection of Monstrous Short Stories

“In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid impact caused a dust cloud so huge that darkness may have pervaded Earth for two years, virtually stopping photosynthesis and leading to the extinction of 75 percent of land animals. Measured against these disasters, we're just not that important. When Earth is done with us, it'll be like, "Well, that Human Pox wasn't great, but at least I didn't get Large Asteroid Syndrome.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don’t. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth’s greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“We're the only part of the known universe that knows it's in a universe. We know we are circling a star that will one day engulf us. We're the only species that knows it has a temporal range.”
― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn't dead; it's not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Humans are not the protagonists of this planet's story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I feel as if I’m on the moon listening to the air hiss out of my spacesuit, and I can’t find the hole. I’m the vice president of panic, and the president is missing.”
― Paige Lewis, Space Struck

“We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the 'I' behind the 'eye' that does the seeing.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I have tried here to map some of the places where my little life brushes up against the big forces shaping contemporary human experience, but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“…. She only ever seemed to bring out the worst in men. They either wanted to control her, touch her, dominate her, silence her, correct, her, or tell her what to do. She didn’t understand why they couldn’t just treat her as a fellow human being, as a colleague, a friend, and equal, or even a stranger on the street, someone to whom is automatically respectful until you find out they’re very do bunch of bodies in the backyard.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry