crystalline > crystalline's Quotes

“Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not. We who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs, or seem to seek them. Who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors. We are not that way from perversity, and we cannot just relax and let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to.”
― Piers Anthony

“Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.”
― Piers Anthony, Castle Roogna

“I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.”
― Piers Anthony

“When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.”
― Piers Anthony, Golem in the Gears

“Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.”
― Piers Anthony

“Never thought I'd see the day when Death was denied. That leaves taxes as the only certainty.”
― Piers Anthony

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.

It tells you.
You don’t tell it.”
― Joan Didion

“We all remember what we need to remember.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,”
― Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

“Memory fades, memory adjusts , memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”
― Joan Didion

“She does not collapse on the stage. She darts onto it, and says the most stunning thing, and then darts off. It is not the weight of her disclosures that stuns the audience, but the lightness of attention as it hovers between there and not there, between her enticing proximity and her blunt distance. Joan Didion is not a penitent in confession, or a lover ready for embrace. She is not even a burlesque dancer. God no. She is a boxer. She floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“All I know about grammar is its infinite power.”
― Joan Didion

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.”
― Joan Didion

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
― James Baldwin

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room