Diane > Diane's Quotes

“Don't you see? This was to be ours together, the successes and the failures...All of this? he said, and couldn't help a smile. Yes, all of this. Then she too smiled.”
― Eowyn Ivey

“She had always been a chameleon, taking on accents and manners suited to her circumstance, but now she felt as though she had changed into something new, and she couldn't change back.”
― Robert Goolrick

“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.”
― M.L Stedman

“Or I can forgive and forget...Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things...we always have a choice.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“At the office I worked in before that, my boss required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here.”
― Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

“Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“The gray tomcat with the white priest’s collar enjoyed sharpening his claws on Franz Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog, a fable that analyzes the human world from a dog’s perspective. On the other hand, orange-white, long-eared Lindgren liked to lie near the books about Pippi Longstocking; she was a fine-looking cat who peered out from the back of the bookshelves and scrutinized each visitor. Lindgren and Kafka would sometimes do Perdu a favor by dropping off one of the upper shelves without warning onto a third-category customer, one of the greasy-fingered”
― Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham - all a sham, James, and it won't stand when things come to be turned inside out and put down for what they”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“Among Agatha’s enviable qualities, perhaps the most significant was her ability to thrive in this man’s world. Following the rules but managing also to rise above them.”
― Nina de Gramont, The Christie Affair

“And you think you have a special power simply because my uncle thinks you possess a pretty face. But that's not power. It's a liability.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

“It was easy to kiss someone when it didn’t matter; it was more difficult when it might be meaningful.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

“Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal. Men would be solicitous and well behaved when they courted a woman, asking her out to parties and sending her flowers, but once they married, the flowers wilted.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

“What someone is means nothing about what kind of person they are. Truth is in actions.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“Art could be beauty, but it was also power.”
― Grace D. Li, Portrait of a Thief

“The first thing the U.S. government did after Pearl Harbor was arrest Hawai'i's Buddhist priests. As community leaders, the men were viewed by both military and civilian officials as a national security threat, an unfounded suspicion that would foreshadow the treatment of American Muslim communities sixty years later in September 2001.”
― Bradford Pearson, The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America

“What in the past had seemed normal suddenly felt abnormally hushed, quiet, and contained. It was like we were in a play that went on forever and ever without any dramatic tension.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“We'd learned about the Holocaust in school, just like we'd learned about the civil rights movement. What we'd never learned was that sometimes the people who kept those ideas alive were the people you lived with.”
― Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane

“I had come to France to discover the place that had existed for so long in my imagination - and in many ways, I had. But I hadn't understood there were other lessons to be learned so far from home: that overseas I was not only a visitor but a guest; not only a student but an envoy; not only an observer but also the observed.”
― Ann Mah, Jacqueline in Paris: A Novel

“Another study, this one by doctors at Imperial College in London, found a neurological anomaly: the area of the cerebellum that receives signals from the 'balance organs" in the inner ear and converts them into feelings of dizziness was visibly smaller in ballet dancers. Through years of practicing turns, they had trained their brains to suppress the sensation of dizziness.”
― Alice Robb, Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet – A Powerful Memoir from the School of American Ballet and the Women Who Survived It

“I don't think you should be afraid of butterflies anymore," she said.
"I'm too old for it?"
"No, it's not that," Stella said, turning toward the door. "It's only--it's funny, isn't it? It's completely counter-evolutionary. How we're scared of things that we might break. So much of our focus goes there. Protecting them, caring for them."
"Well, what should we be afraid of instead?"
"Why, the things that might break us, of course," said Stella.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Every institution that employs young women inevitably places those young women at the bottom of the ladder. And every artistic institution deals with people whose outsize ambitions and egos mean they will do anything to get ahead. I’d watched all the Me Too scandals unfold—Weinstein,”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“Everything good is risky....The thing that you have to remember is that if you -don't- risk anything, you risk everything.

[Lindsay Price, to Delphine Léger]”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Ballerinas

“The shape of who you are is an image of heaven and earth," I whispered to the baby, Sun Simiao's words quoted in a book Nurse Jeongsu had gifted me with, an encyclopedia I still perused every year.”
― June Hur, The Red Palace

“The things we agree to call art are the shamanic tokens of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can't really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide. Everything or nothing.”
― Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World

“...the more we value things outside our control, the less we have.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“Negative capability…quoting Keats: “Discard your memory,” he implored. “Discard the future tense of your desire; forget…both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“Curiosity and passion are the enemies of anxiety. Even when I fell into anxiety, if I get curious enough about something outside of me it can help pull me out. Music, art, film, nature, conversation, words. Find passion as large as your fear. The way out of your mind is via the world.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“Your worth is you. Your worth is your presence. Your worth is right there. Your worth isn't something you earn. Your worth isn't something you buy. Your worth isn't something you gain through status on popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You were born with worth, as all babies are, and that worth doesn't disappear simply because you have grown a little older. You are a human, being.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“Forgiving other people is great practice for forgiving yourself when the time comes.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book