Beth > Beth's Quotes

“And which would be better? To have those days boiled down into one intense burst of color, or to have the pin removed from the thorax every now and then, dusty wings fluttering back to life, a little more time eked out before being locked away again?”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“She catches snippets of what they’re saying: how dogs don’t need to live as long as humans, they’re simply so good at finding the joy in life. As if we are put on this earth to extract a certain amount of happiness and can leave once the job is done.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“Without realizing it, from the time we are three or four years old, most of us come to the dangerous conclusion that we often have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend.”
― Kerry Patterson, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

“They laughed, and Daisy learned that sad laughter lands differently in the atmosphere than the regular kind.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home: A Novel

“Without hesitation, she pressed her thumb against the apps until they began to wobble and, one at a time, she deleted each of them. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. Gone.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home: A Novel

“Eight weeks. That’s how long it took Daisy to grow up, never mind that her period would not show up until October. When she arrived in San Juan at the beginning of that summer, she’d been an anxious, small-voiced child. She’d been a kid like all others, glued to her phone, almost entirely defined by a constant thread of worry she didn’t even know existed. That worry was so continual, Daisy had failed to notice the way it sat heavy in her stomach in a fluttering pit. She hadn’t known it was possible to evict that sinking, frenetic feeling. She hadn’t known that the rod of tension usually bulleting down the back of her neck didn’t have to be there, until it was gone.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home: A Novel

“Suffering isn’t some kind of external, objective source of oppression and pain.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“If you can recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“The great news is that oneness of body and mind can be realized just by one in-breath.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering

“Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“Throughout my career I’ve maintained that people in positions of power must be required to ask of themselves: Who am I not hearing from? Then make it their business to seek those folks out.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“own community. Most people don’t want to leave home. They don’t want to leave their grandmother, their church, their friends, their language. And when they do, it is usually for one of two reasons: they fear for their lives, or they can’t make a living.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“Then the Dobbs decision came down. Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“We were the first family at the vice president’s residence to have a mezuzah on the doorpost. The one we affixed came from a synagogue in Atlanta where Dr. King preached when it opened its doors to Black worshippers after their church was burned by segregationists.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“I wanted to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, and history of the region, but it seemed very few people had the appetite for that or the willingness to hold two tragic narratives in their mind at the same time, to grieve for human suffering both Israeli and Palestinian.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“But it remains true that the vice president’s role will be as little or as much as the sitting president desires. That can be a hard pill to swallow.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“He’s an expert at suggesting that someone is a fraud—that you cannot believe this person. Which I believe some psychologists would call “projection.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“When the ACLU, in 2019, asked me to fill out a questionnaire, and one of the questions was about gender health care for incarcerated adults, I said I supported whatever was medically necessary. (Which is what the law says and what Donald Trump upheld as president. During his term, trans people in federal prison received the hormone treatments they were seeking.) I reiterated that view when asked in an interview. And that was what the Trump team sliced and diced for their ad.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“The pundits proclaim as conventional wisdom that the ad was Trump’s knockout punch, that this was the principal factor that stalled us out in mid-October. I believe that it is the conventional wisdom of middle-aged men who don’t live in battleground states and were the target of those ads.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“Musk’s notorious $1 million “random” sweepstakes, which his lawyers have since admitted in court was anything but random, drove traffic to X where he could praise Trump and denigrate me with insults and fake images, such as the ridiculous AI-generated picture where I am depicted wearing a cap with a hammer and sickle. He was Trump’s one-man super PAC and campaign media arm all rolled into one.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“No good public policy can be made with a chain saw.”
― Kamala Harris, 107 Days

“There was an old musician’s cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano. But her life was a cacophony of nonsense. A piece that could have gone in wonderful directions, but now went nowhere at all.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just…’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“No. The Book of Regrets is getting lighter. There’s a lot of white space in there now…It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. This is one of your barriers.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library