Chris Kauzlarich > Chris's Quotes

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“The tattooing has taken only seconds, but Lale’s shock makes time stand still. He grasps his arm, staring at the number. How can someone do this to another human being? He wonders if for the rest of his life, be it short or long, he will be defined by this moment, this irregular number: 32407.”
― Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz

“Nations can threaten other nations. They have power, they have militaries. How can a race that is spread out across multiple countries be considered a threat? For as long as he lives, be it short or long, he knows he will never comprehend this.”
― Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz

“His mother he can see perfectly. But how do you say goodbye to your mother? The person who gave you breath, who taught you how to live?”
― Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Without sadness, happiness cannot exist.”
― William Dameron, The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out

“This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I’d seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve—and guilty, all the time.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“Henry James described the Hopkins as a place where, despite “the immensities of pain” one thought of “fine poetry . . . and the high beauty of applied science. . . . Grim human alignments became, in their cool vistas, delicate symphonies in white. . . . Doctors ruled, for me, so gently, the whole still concert.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Public health experts monitor this drift and each year adjust the flu vaccine to try to keep pace. But they will never be able to match up perfectly, because even if they predict the direction of mutation, the fact that influenza viruses exist as mutating swarms means some will always be different enough to evade both the vaccine and the immune system.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lights—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“For those who ask why there is no White History Month, the answer illustrates how whiteness works. White history is implied in the absence of its acknowledgment; white history is the norm for history. Thus, our need to qualify that we are speaking about black history or women’s history suggests that these contributions lie outside the norm.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Whites also produce and reinforce the dominant narratives of society—such as individualism and meritocracy—and use these narratives to explain the positions of other racial groups. These narratives allow us to congratulate ourselves on our success within the institutions of society and blame others for their lack of success.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Some things are so bad that just to have been near them taints you, leaves a spot of badness in your soul like a bare patch in the forest where nothing will grow.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“There was another year and a half from that picture to the next one. In that time, the darkness that had thickened the spaces among the trees in that second photo had gathered about us, swallowed us the way those trout had consumed the water-skimmers.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“Love is a shape-shifting monster, she thinks, dizzy and horrified and exhausted and devastated. A werewolf with a bottomless stomach.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home

“A wail escapes the man. He wishes it would pull his guts out with it. Leave his rotten insides steaming on the ground. No less than he deserves. He tries to wail again, but there’s no breath. Nothing inside him anymore to propel the grief that’s boiling in his heart.”
― Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home