Ashley A-F > Ashley's Quotes

“If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us - which is both the good and the bad news”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“But who cares? Memory isn't about reality, and neither is music. It's about the comforting reflections we want to hold on to, even if they're mostly bullshit.”
― Spitznagel, Eric

“The fact that Nellie wasn't any one person but rather a composite of three of the real Laura's antagonists' worst traits makes her even more terrifying, some kind of blond Frankenstein assembled from assorted bitch parts.”
― Wendy McClure, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

“If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?”
― Wendy McClure, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

“But even drugged to the gills, I remained filled with dread about the impending book tour, so I went also to a young but highly regarded Stanford-trained psychologist who specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. “First thing we’ve got to do,” she said in one of my early sessions with her, “is to get you off these drugs.” A few sessions later, she offered to take my Xanax from me and lock it in a drawer in her desk. She opened the drawer to show me the bottles deposited there by some of her other patients, holding one up and shaking it for effect. The drugs, she said, were a crutch that prevented me from truly experiencing and thereby confronting my anxiety; if I didn’t expose myself to the raw experience of anxiety, I would never learn that I could cope with it on my own.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“Studies of the DSM-II found that when two psychiatrists consulted the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only between 32 and 42 percent of the time.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I’ve learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: “the need and ability”—as described in the self-help book Your Phobia—“to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”c”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“Each of us is a museum that opens for business the moment we’re born, with memory the sole curator.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Life was good back then, in the crappy, oppressive way life is good for fourteen year olds, which is to say, it completely sucked but seems pretty good in the obscuring glare of nostalgia.”
― Al Burian, Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One Through Nine