Lesley Handel > Lesley's Quotes

“Dropping an f-bomb wouldn’t make me an idiot any more than saying “sesquipedalian” makes someone intelligent.”
― Brigid Kemmerer, Letters to the Lost

“Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary response to and against indifference?”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“(In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.)”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“Puberty” was a fancy word for your genitals stabbing you in the back.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation, submitted the eighty-five-letter Cherokee alphabet, hoping that her language would still be spoken a hundred years from now.”
― Paul A. Offit, Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases

“Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO. Mattis, with agreement from Dunford, began saying that Russia was an existential threat to the United States.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“Nearly all economists disagreed with Trump, but he found an academic economist who hated free trade as much as he did. He brought him to the White House as both director of trade and industrial policy and director of the National Trade Council. Peter Navarro was a 67-year-old Harvard PhD in economics. “This is the president’s vision,” Navarro publicly said. “My function really as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“had no interest in allies, Trump said. He didn’t want any troops in South Korea even when reminded about the differential between the seven seconds to detect an ICBM launch from there as opposed to 15-minute detection from Alaska.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“Everyone wants your position,” Trump continued. “I made a huge mistake giving it to you.” The president continued with venom. It was chilling. Cohn had never been talked to or treated like that in his life. “This is treason,” Trump said.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“Eventually Porter developed a routine and would bring in two to 10 decision memos for him to sign each day. Trump liked signing. It meant he was doing things, and he had an up-and-down penmanship that looked authoritative in black Magic Marker.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“Trump was determined to impose steel tariffs. “Look,” Trump said, “we’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll undo it.” “Mr. President,” Cohn said, “that’s not what you do with the U.S. economy.” Because the stakes were so high, it was crucial to be conservative. “You do something when you’re 100 percent certain it will work, and then you pray like hell that you’re right. You don’t do 50/50s with the U.S. economy.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“NAFTA was another enduring Trump target. The president had said for months he wanted to leave NAFTA and renegotiate. “The only way to get a good deal is to blow up the old deal. When I blow it up, in that six months, they’ll come running back to the table.” His theory of negotiation was that to get to yes, you first had to say no. “Once you blow it up,” Cohn replied, “it may be over. That’s the most high-risk strategy. That either works or you go bankrupt.” Cohn realized that Trump had gone bankrupt six times and seemed not to mind. Bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“I did not even really know how to access that once-safe place with the outdoor kitchen, the red roof, the birds-of-paradise. Nostalgia was a destructive exercise, a jab at a still-tender wound, stitched up poorly.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Maintaining my body had been so much work, so costly. Protecting it had been a never-ending battle. It was not a source of joy. I had been dragging it around for thirteen years, trying to keep it from harm. I felt like it stood in my way.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“They’re in the presence of the beast now, an enormous incisor sunk into the horizon.”
― Brantley Hargrove, The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras

“If they could have compared notes, one colony of survivors to another, they would have found that the number of successful human births on Earth that year had been zero. But they did not know, and so hope persisted.”
― Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

“Men aren’t rational, you know.” He put his hands at his hips and leaned back a little. “It’s not our fault, it just how we’re made. We don’t bleed like women, so we have to find ways to bleed like men. It leads us into foolhardy things. Like the wars of the old world.”
― Meg Elison, The Book of Etta

“I think that in the old world, women were slaves. Maybe not like they are now, but somebody needed that vest. Somebody needed her pills or her rings to keep from getting pregnant. Maybe slavery just looked nicer back then.”
― Meg Elison, The Book of Etta

“I found an essay in a book called Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, in which every time the men go off to war they lose all their language. When they return home they can’t describe to their families what they saw, so they go back to war to learn the words again.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Before the Belgians arrived and colonized Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis lived in peace. But colonization is built on the idea that we are not the same, that we don’t possess equal humanity. The Belgians imposed their cruel ideology: their belief that people with certain-sized skulls and certain-width noses were better and smarter than others, that they belonged to a superior race. This ideology leached into the Rwandan psyche and caused the country to self-destruct.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“All at once, it seemed, the leaves of cottonwood trees around the cabin turned golden and whispered to themselves, then curled into black flutes and floated to the ground in crispy, lacy heaps.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Autumn leaves don’t fall; they fly. They take their time and wander on this, their only chance to soar. Reflecting sunlight, they swirled and sailed and fluttered on the wind drafts.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“In some ways I think every wrong turn I was to make . . . could be traced to moments of inaction, moments when I noticed things unfolding wrongly and failed to query or object.” —Heat Lightning, by Leah Hager Cohen”
― Diane Pomerantz, Lost in the Reflecting Pool: A Memoir

“The way he used words was really verbal masturbation”
― Diane Pomerantz, Lost in the Reflecting Pool: A Memoir