Mimi > Mimi's Quotes

“Ψυχῆς ἰατρεῖον
“A House of Healing for the Soul.”
(in reference to a bookstore)”
― King Ozymandias

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“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

“You will hear no a lot. It's about not giving up and having the absurd belief that someone, somewhere will say yes. I don't go away easily.”
― Mary Roach

“You can take my heart, but I can't let you take my dog.”
― Karin Slaughter

“Words belong in contexts, not pegged out like biological specimens.”
― Philip Pullman, La Belle Sauvage

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
― Danny Kahneman

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”
― Dr. Seuss

“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“If you invest in a girl or a woman, you’re investing in everyone else.”
― Melinda Gates

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation”
― Studs Terkel

“For all we know, the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink invisible?”
― Amos Tversky

“(Even when hearing an illogical argument Danny asked:) What might this be true of?”
― Danny Kahneman

“Last impressions can be lasting impressions.”
― Don Redelmeier

“I've just read it so much, it memorized itself.”
― Philip Pullman, La Belle Sauvage

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.”
― Amos Tversky

“He who sees the past as surprise free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”
― Amos Tversky

“Amos believed that people go way out of their way to avoid minor embarrassments and he decided very early on in his life that it was not worth it.”
― Amos Tversky

“A person's a person, no matter how small.”
― Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!

“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them—and that is what apartheid stole from us: time.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix, and in a lot of cases want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“In America the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“None of them had cars, either. There was no future in which most of these families would ever have cars. There was maybe one car for every thousand people, yet almost everyone had a driveway. It was almost like building the driveway was a way of willing the car to happen. The story of Soweto is the story of the driveways. It’s a hopeful place. —”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining.
“Why are you crying?!”
“Because Fufi loves another boy.”
“So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.”
Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.
I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“The final portrait is often furthest from the truth.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine