Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”
― Francois Mauriac

“Of course, single people are lonely. Of course. We have all been lonely. For moments, for days, for endless, chilled seasons of sequestration. For some women, the loneliness may stem from, or be exacerbated by, the drain of having to do everything for yourself.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“To be clear, the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hustled nearly all (non-enslaved) women, regardless of their individual desires, ambitions, circumstances, or the quality of available matches, down a single highway toward early heterosexual marriage and motherhood.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has sensibly observed, “human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we’ve heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probably that they have decided that marriage doesn’t advance their interests as much as it once did.”60”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“In many ways, the emotional and economic self-sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than the state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one’s own means shouldering one’s own burdens in a way that being coupled rarely demands. It means doing everything—making decisions, taking responsibility, paying bills, cleaning the refrigerator—without the benefits of formal partnership. But we’ve still got a lot of hardwired assumptions that the successful female life is measured not in professional achievements or friendships or even satisfying sexual relationships, but by whether you’re legally coupled.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation