susannah > susannah's Quotes

“Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.”
― Helen Keller

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

“That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
― James Joyce

“The best revenge is living well without you. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, ed.

“And, in return, when I get sick, you can come out and look after me when the others get fed up of me. That’s what we are all for.”
― Colm Tóibín, Nora Webster

“She’d buy diamond-studded earplugs and go and lie on a beach in the Caribbean where the whining of jealous bastards wouldn’t reach her.”
― Sophie Hannah, The Dead Lie Down

“Even after rejection of articles that helpfully advertised their lack of a scientific basis by the use of words such as organic, holistic, and natural, I was left with a mass of data,”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect

“When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.”
― Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“If I’m going to be a culchie I might as well have the trappings.”
― Laura Elliot, Fragile Lies

“Half the country wouldn’t have died if the landlords hadn’t kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting, evicting, torching cabins…Or if the government at Westminster hadn’t thought it the most prudent course of action to sit on their arses and let the Irish starve.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Were the housing estates of boom-time Ireland lousy with Lexapro? In the quiet of a weekday morning, was there an underground sea of silent desperation? ‘Motherhood is the making of you,’ is how you are supposed to feel, but what if it turns out to be the breaking of you? How many women go without help, ashamed to say it? How many mothers stick a pill on their tongues every morning and hope for the best, like Martha?”
― Aidan Comerford, Corn Flakes For Dinner: A Heartbreaking Comedy About Family Life

“Take a couple of days off work at the end of next week; make a long weekend out of it. Get lost for a while,’ she said, kindly. Martha had just created our golden rule of parenting children on the autistic spectrum: we can’t both be crazy at once.”
― Aidan Comerford, Corn Flakes For Dinner: A Heartbreaking Comedy About Family Life

“She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.” Mira’s mouth”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Peri was aware that Deniz, having reached the delicate age of twelve and a half, had to break free of her parents’ – especially the materfamilias’s – influence. She understood that. What she couldn’t get her head around was the amount of fury involved in the process.”
― Elif Shafak, Three Daughters of Eve

“Early on she learned that there was no fight more hurtful than a family fight, and no family fight more hurtful than one over God.”
― Elif Shafak, Three Daughters of Eve

“It was a miserable power struggle to break him. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to win an argument with a cat, but good luck with that. He would slip out when we weren’t looking, settle scores in some back alley near midnight, and return two days later like Don Draper crashing through the front door after a bender. What? What are you looking at?”
― Sarah Hepola, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

“These days, it was all about showcasing your abilities to get that elusive university place. Problem was, instead of making these kids stand out as individuals, as leaders, in Noel’s view all it showed was that they could bear more drudgery than the average child.”
― Paula Daly, The Trophy Child

“What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“This isn’t London, Cat. You might be able to run across Piccadilly Circus, naked as the day you were born and no one’d pay a blind bit of notice, but around here, if your washing’s out too long, folk start to speculate. Secrets”
― Caz Frear, Sweet Little Lies

“There they clambered onto a radiator and peered out the high window through their tears to watch a car leaving with their baby. The marks on the radiator from their shoes were visible up to as late as 2017.”
― Paul Jude Redmond, The Adoption Machine: The Dark History of Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes and the Inside Story of How ‘Tuam 800’ Became a Global Scandal

“only times she got shit-faced enough to show it the next day were New Year’s Eve, weddings, and the occasional book club that got out of hand.”
― Linda Keir, Drowning with Others

“The rooms weren't empty, they were filled with the absence of someone.”
― graham norton, A Keeper

“Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“The world news had been depressing throughout most of his life, but this past two or three years, it had seemed even more so, with the parade of creepy and dangerous clowns that British and American politics had become, the nuclear threat growing and Russia up to her old habits.”
― Peter Robinson, Careless Love

“The commissioner has requested permission to use water cannon against the civilian population for the first time in British history—” “Although it has been used in Northern Ireland,” the interviewer chipped in. “Yes, in very specific circumstances.” And who cares about the Paddies anyway? I filled in silently. As usual, what was perfectly acceptable in Belfast or Derry would be an outrage in Southwark.”
― Jane Casey, The Kill

“When I say there was a reality TV show mentality to our administration, I’m not kidding. And I am ashamed to say that I lost sight of what I was there to do—serve the country—more than once. That was life with Donald Trump.”
― Stephanie Grisham, I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House

“one thing I’ve learnt is never to underestimate the confidence of the most unremarkable of men.”
― Marian Keyes, Again, Rachel