Lorie > Lorie's Quotes

“I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.”
― Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

“I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.”
― Anne Tyler

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”
― Carol Shields, The Republic of Love

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.”
― Anne Lamott

“It always seems impossible until it's done.”
― Nelson Mandela

“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt? I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me from one place to the next. The virgin birth, the resurrection, and the countless miracles -my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe.

A bell, though, that's fucked up.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.”
― Erma Bombeck

“(The unsatisfying thing about practicing restraint was that nobody knew you were practicing it.)”
― Anne Tyler, Vinegar Girl

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“If there's empty spaces in your heart,
They'll make you think it's wrong,
Like having empty spaces,
Means you never can be strong,
But I've learned that all these spaces,
Means there's room enough to grow,
And the people that once filled them,
Were always meant to be let go,
And all these empty spaces,
Create a strange sort of pull,
That attract so many people,
You wouldn't meet if they were full,
So if you're made of empty spaces,
Don't ever think it's wrong,
Because maybe they're just empty,
Until the right person comes along.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“It was vital to free folk from illiteracy, to save those imprisoned by its bondage, she’d said.”
― Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman's Daughter

“Though it rarely happens fast enough and not near as quick as it should, Honey, I expect like all ugly laws, change will come.”
― Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman's Daughter