Mara Washburn > Mara's Quotes

“It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“You can’t change how other people think and act, but you’re in full control of you. When it comes down to it, the only question that matters is this: If nothing in the world ever changes, what type of man are you gonna be?”
― Nic Stone, Dear Martin

“Our presence is not inherently evil and undesirable; it just has to be at the right scale, speed, and design. We can be an expression of biodiversity as worthy as any other species with whom we have co-evolved; we have a place and a vibrant role to play in ecosystems. It is our wild excess of procreation, ill-considered consumption priorities, and unbridled frenzy of activity that drowns the possibilities and existence of individuals from other species. That is where we have gone wrong.”
― Will Anderson, This Is Hope: Green Vegans and the New Human Ecology

“Choosing to eat fewer animal products is probably the most important action an individual can take to reverse global warming—it has a known and significant effect on the environment, and, done collectively, would push the culture and the marketplace with more force than any march.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Knowledge, I’ve found, will not betray you the way that people will.”
― Axton Betz-Hamilton, The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“We are so busy teaching girls to be likeable that we often forget to teach them, as we do boys, that they should be respected.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk. Like they did for Edward Wayne Edwards, twenty-nine years after he killed Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, in Sullivan, Wisconsin. Like they did for Kenneth Lee Hicks, thirty years after he killed Lori Billingsley, in Aloha, Oregon.

The doorbell rings.

No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell.

This is how it ends for you.

“You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,” you threatened a victim once.

Open the door. Show us your face.

Walk into the light.”
― Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

“People often learn more from getting an undeserved pass than they would from being punished.”
― Nic Stone, Dear Martin

“The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“They sleep like children, mouths open, cheeks flushed. Breathing as rhythmic as swells on a sea. No longer allowed in the rooms, their mothers and fathers watch them through double-paned glass. Isolation - that's what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well. But isn't every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“I have always let you know how much I care, right? You never had to wonder. I'm not a man for words. Daddy showed me that you 'do' for a woman. Remember that time when you damn near had a nervous breakdown because it looked like the hickory-nut tree in the front yard was thinking about dying? Where I'm from, we don't believe in spending money on pets, let alone trees. But I couldn't bear to see you fret, so I hired a tree doctor. See, in my mind, that was a love letter.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.”
― Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Maurice Sendak

“If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”
― Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream

“Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

“She was Katherine, she was the teacher's pet, and when she grew up, she was going to be a librarian, because she couldn't imagine knowing there was a job that was all about books and not wanting to do it.”
― Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream

“I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

“But Erin has empathy, lots of it, so much it hurts sometimes, so much that other people's pain turns into her own pain and makes her completely incapable of doing anything useful for anyone. That's why it's easier to avoid it than to engage. It's easier to try to ignore it than try to comfort whoever's hurting, because usually that backfires and makes things worse.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Because unlike boys, girls turn inward. They hide. They adapt, even if it hurts. Because they are not screaming, people assume they do not suffer.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“What Erin wants to do with pain is fix it, make it go away, and sometimes that's not what other people want.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“When she is done she looks at herself in the mirror. Maybe she does not hate what she sees. Maybe she does not blame the image reflected back at her for everything bad that has happened.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“She was a woman with something to protect. That made her more dangerous than they could ever have suspected.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway