Lori > Lori's Quotes

“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”
― Anne Lamott

“I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that alot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott

“Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take a visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“...all the thousands of God's children who have flung themselves, stupid and glorious, over and over, into the best and worst of things, loving whom they should not, seizing what they must not, running where they cannot, falling where there is no one to catch them - how this serves the betterment or edification of the species is not clear; people do it regardless. People have always done it.”
― Stacia M. Brown, Accidents of Providence

“Now they were sixtyish and gray and almost as wide as they were tall, and so accustomed to each other's habits that whenever he sneezed, she blew her nose.”
― Stacia M. Brown, Accidents of Providence

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein

“The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Itt iss Eevill…"
"What is going to happen?"
"Wee wwill cconnttinnue tto ffightt!"…
"And we’re not alone, you know, children," came Mrs.Whatsit, the comforter. "…some of the best fighters have come from your own planet…"
"Who have our fighters been?" Calvin asked.
"Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs.Whatsit said. Mrs.Who’s spectacles shone out at them triumphantly.
"And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings

“When it came down to it, one of them called the shots. The other did what he was told. The question is, what if the other is a lot more than one?”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread on top of it. It was the best time of her life.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“He sits aloof from the rest of the family, an inaccessible island with a rocky shoreline. You cannot make landfall on your own. You must first take my mother on board as the pilot to guide you through the treacherous channel. And her MO depends on the nature of the mission.

Sometimes when we had infuriated him, she was like one of those little grooming fish swimming right up to the great white shark in an apparently suicidal approach an nibbling at the menacing snout. And we would hold our breath, waiting for her to be gobbled up in a flash of fish fangs, but the great white wld exhibit some instinctive override, some primal understanding of emotional symbiosis, and would tolerate her proximity. And so the pattern had been established over decades.”
― Peter Godwin

“Banana is also a Methodist minister who became a liberation theologian and once reworked the Lord's Prayer to include the lines: "Teach us to demand our share of the gold/And forgive us our docility.”
― Peter Godwin

“Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life's alibi in the face of death.”
― Peter Godwin

“My only regret involved the sad knowledge that I could not handle the amount of alcohol I would have enjoyed. “Easy is the descent into Hell.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice

“The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way.”
― Publius Vergilius Maro, The Aeneid

“Gallowglass returned to Sporrengasse with two vampires and a pretzel.”
― Deborah Harkness, Shadow of Night

“It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“I don't think I can keep looking at this stuff, Buster," she informed him, handing the camera to her brother. "It makes me want to drink either more alcohol or none, and I can't imagine either possibility.”
― Kevin Wilson

“As lives go, I'll take the quietly desperate over the radically bipolar.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“Don't do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.”
― Henry Rollins

“Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, "Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly." Freedom says, "Even not to choose is to choose." Freedom says, "So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings." Freedom says, "You're on your own. Deal with it.”
― Daniel B. Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

“This is why therapists go to such lengths to urge their anxious patients away from intellectualization: The first step toward peace is disarmament.”
― Daniel B. Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

“It's like I've had a stroke. Do you think I've had a stroke?"
"I don't think you've had a stroke."
"But how do you know? How can you be sure I haven't had a stroke?"
"What are the symptoms of a stroke?"
"I don't know. Look them up. Look them up on line."
"OK. Hold on...OK. Here it is. Do you have trouble speaking?"
"I have trouble speaking intelligently.”
― Daniel B. Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

“And what nags me about this is that the source of my anxiety was exactly what Kierkegaard says the source of anxiety is, and what he praised in direct proportion to the volume any person possesses: possibility. The awareness that life is a series of choices any one of which could be either aggrandizing or disastrous. That this happens to be true I have no trouble signing on to. Any who has lived past the age of ten knows that even piddling actions can wind up having big consequences, and that even when you are super-conscious of your behaviors you can't know how things are going to turn out in the short- or the long-run. That's the drama of it all. On the one hand, your very existence means you can and will change things in your life and others. On the other hand, you aren't God, so everything is always going to be drenched in uncertainty and doubt.”
― Daniel B. Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

“Even the imperative to make choice after choice without clear guidance - allegedly the most nerve-wracking part of the profession - isn't exclusive to writing.”
― Daniel B. Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

“Singin' In the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won't get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward.”
― Daniel B. Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

“I just want to clarify that I don't mean 'without my vagina' like I didn't have it with me at the time. I just mean that I wasn't, you know...displaying it while I was at Starbucks. That's probably understood, but I thought I should clarify, since it's the first chapter and you don't know that much about me. So just to clarify, I always have my vagina with me. It's like my American Express card. (In that I don't leave home without it. Not that I use it to buy stuff with.)”
― Jenny Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir