Beth > Beth's Quotes

“It turns out brushing her hair isn’t enough. Bella produces a stiff woolen dress from her office closet. It’s one of those respectable, pocketless affairs that obliges ladies to carry stupid little handbags, so Juniper can’t take so much as a melted candle-stub or a single snake tooth with her. Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women’s dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very damn much.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“It’s as subtle and significant as a heartbeat.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“I’ve seen bad things, too,” he assures her. “Yeah?” He nods. “I guess you wouldn’t be on top of this train if you hadn’t.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“Marisol. Do not ask me to choose between who I love and who I am. I fear it would not reflect well on either one of us.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana

“As someone who can fall prey to comparing myself and my life to edited and curated Instagram feeds, I laughed so hard when he told me that due to the physics of how grass grows, when we peer over our fence at our neighbor’s grass, it actually does look greener, even if it is truly the same lushness as our own grass. I mean, does it get better than that? The grass actually does look greener on the other side,”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“While most of us think of boredom as a negative feeling, it turns out that not all experiences of boredom are bad. In fact, if it weren’t for boredom, you wouldn’t be reading this book or any book by me. Let me explain the research first. A recent study showed that simple, boring tasks or mundane activities can allow our minds to wander, daydream, and create. The lack of stimulation that defines “being bored” gives our imagination room to play and grow.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“He thought about the life he had led, and all those years of training. He thought he’d been training his body and his mind but really he’d been training the habit. Habit was the strongest thing inside him right now. It was overriding the fear. It was overriding the logic and the want and it was overriding the need. There was nothing”
― Katie Kitamura, The Longshot

“It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“whether you long to ease the pain of your ancestors, or for a world in which life could survive without consuming other life; whether you yearn for a lost person, an unborn child, the fountain of youth, or unconditional love: These are all manifestations of the same great ache.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms. Writers and artists, mystics and philosophers, have long tried to give voice to it. García Lorca called it the “mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“to see you kids eating my berries.” I knew the difference: In the fields behind my house, the berries belonged to themselves.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“These berries belong to me,” she said, “not to you. I don’t want to see you kids eating my berries.” I knew the difference: In the fields behind my house, the berries belonged to themselves. At this lady’s roadside stand, she sold them for sixty cents a quart.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants