Joanne > Joanne's Quotes

“The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Call me a schoolmarm, but few things make me angrier than people not taking good care of library materials.”
― Tim Gunn, Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

“You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.”
― Tina Fey

“No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“creative people appear to be difficult because the expectations for a project keep changing midstream, after they’ve done a tremendous amount of conceptual work that will have to be rehashed just to get back to the starting line. Is it possible that what comes across as ego is merely a response to their craft’s— which they’ve spent years mastering and cultivating—being challenged at a moment’s notice by someone who has given their hard work a total of ten seconds of distracted consideration before scrapping it?”
― Todd Henry, Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need

“failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“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

“This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Gregory [Corso] made lists of books for me to read, told me the best dictionary to own, encouraged and challenged me. Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.”
― Groucho Marx

“Sarah Vine, writing in the Daily Mail, admitted a different view of the duchess, who had set up a stall next to the main wedding marquee promoting her range of teas: ‘The woman is utterly incorrigible. And yet. There is something about her indefatigable, indestructible nature that I can’t help but admire. Something in her propensity for pratfalls of her own making that makes her so much more human than other royals.’ Vine likened her to ‘a human Labrador: clumsy, over-excitable, greedy, prone to causing breakages with her constantly wagging tail – but ultimately impossible to remain angry with for all that long’.”
― Andrew Lownie, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York

“The Newsnight programme ‘Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal’ was shown on the BBC on 16 November. The press reaction was instantaneous and unanimous. The Washington Post called it ‘a car crash’, while the New York Times reported that ‘experts on the royal family have described the interview as the biggest public relations debacle for the British royal family since the turbulent aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in 1997.’ ‘I expected a train wreck,’ tweeted Charlie Proctor, editor of the Royal Central website. ‘That was a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion level bad.”
― Andrew Lownie, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York