Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“And that stupid little girl stood in the winter and kept lighting matches to catch glimpses of families that weren’t—could never be—hers and froze to death in those harsh moments of reality between matches, because even though matches can burn, they’re light, not heat.”
― Dot Hutchison, The Butterfly Garden

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. - James Baldwin”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else’s reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn’t know how to get it back.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

“Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.

... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

“in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”1 Time”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

“She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn't kill, but she seemed to die a little.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

“Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Just one more moment. Just give us one more. But maybe her heart would never be satisfied; maybe it was ever-enlarging in its want for me. Because she knew that if she were granted one more moment, then another one was what she would ask for. She could live around her son for a hundred years and even then, when it was time to part, she would think - but it has been too brief.”
― Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us

“Amar, I know this will mean nothing to you now. But I do believe that even your father’s God, even He, would forgive you. To know you is to want to let you in.”
― Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us

“Back then, Layla remembered thinking that humiliation was a deeper wound than heartache. She had wanted to protect them all from it. Now, as they stood beneath the spotlight on the stage, before the remaining guests who surely must be whispering to one another—where is their son, does he not care for them enough to stay for the family photograph?—she knew better. Knew that it did not matter what anyone thought if her own heart were not at peace. Only after her worst fears were confirmed did she realize there had been no use in letting her fears determine her decisions. She was finally free of them. She finally knew: she wanted Amar there in any state, under any circumstance, regardless of what anyone had to say about it.”
― Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us

“We pray together and when it is time for us to ask for what our hearts desire, my first wish is that he remain steadfast in faith, and then if he does not, that he never believe that God is a being with a heart like a human's, capable of being small and vindictive.”
― Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us

“Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies