Stef > Stef's Quotes

“A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.”
― Ken Follett, Fall of Giants

“President Wilson says a leader must treat public opinion the way a sailor deals with the wind, using it to blow the ship in one direction or another, but never trying to go directly against it.”
― Ken Follett, Fall of Giants

“The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“We are who we are, be­cause of those we choose to love and be­cause of those who love us.”
― Kate Mosse, The Winter Ghosts

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be . . . There will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness and dyspepsia.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself awy from the computer, to read a magazine or book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find the prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could have only been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
― Jane Goodall