Cindy > Cindy's Quotes

“Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. Brown”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“He needs to go rub his soul against life.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, ofen well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“First with the head, then with the heart, you'll be ahead from the start.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“He was such an enigma, really - fierce and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn't one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.”
― Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
― Anna Quindlen

“History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”
― Julius Lester

“We 're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren 't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all" - Lucretia Mott in The Invention of Wings
― Sue Monk Kidd”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“Mother shook her head impatiently. 'You need to...stop looking for heroes, Anne.' Her speech was slow, slurred, but understandable. 'Only the weak need...heroes...and heroes need...those around them to remain weak. You're...not weak.' I remembered those words. I knew they were true, all of them. True about me, and true about Charles. I brought them out, every now and then, as I kept working -- on both the manuscript and myself. And, perhaps on my definition of my marriage. No, my prayer for my marriage; a marriage of two equals. With separate -- but equally valid -- views of the world; shared goggles no more, but looking at the same scenery, at the same time.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator's Wife

“Sometimes karma takes years to pay a person back, but that day, it had a fast backhand return...”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Someone Else's Love Story

“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“What we can't speak, we say in silence.”
― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound

“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“It's really not about reading a good book.  Rather, it about being transformed by great ideas.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“Remember, love that doesn't include honesty doesn't deserve to be called love.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“Addiction is, in that way, just like love - in the early moments, you don't see the potential for it to bring you pain - it's just something you slide into between laughs and smiles and moments of bliss. It's something that feels like a shield, until you realize it's actually a warhead, and it's pointed right at you.”
― Kelly Rimmer, Before I Let You Go

“The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die Jägerin.

Let this wheel stop.

Let us not forget this time.

Let us remember.”
― Kate Quinn, The Huntress

“Though no one speaks of it, I sometimes wonder if we are marching toward extinction with each performance, too busy dancing and flying through the air to see it.”
― Pam Jenoff, The Orphan's Tale

“Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls