Jacklynn > Jacklynn's Quotes

“I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone.”
― Bich Minh Nguyen, Stealing Buddha's Dinner

“We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.”
― Miranda July

“Where there is law there is injustice”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“...his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it & animosity was hard to determine”
― Charles Dickens

“In the West, for example, people believe they must 'pursue happiness' as if it were some kind of a flighty bird that is always out of reach. In the East, we believe we are born with happiness and one of life's important tasks, my mother told me, is to protect it.”
― Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Goodhue wanted visitors to feel more than they were in a pretty building. He wanted them to feel they were part of a three-dimensional meditation on the power of human intellect and the potency of storytelling.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Chill" is a selfishness disguised as kindness”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“We don’t need other people’s love in order to love ourselves; we don’t need a romantic partner to be ‘complete.’ But we need other people to teach us how to love ourselves best”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people. ”
― John Adams, Constitutional Documents of the United States of America

“In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure and perpetually curious”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events. Divorce may be an event, but it almost always results from a lengthy process...”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events. Divorce may be an event, but it almost always results from a lengthy process - and the same could be said for birth, or battle, or infection. Similarly, much of what some imagine as dichotomous turns out to be spectral, from neurodivergence to sexuality, and much of what appears to be the work of individuals turns out to be the work of broad collaborations. We love a narrative of the great individual whose life is shot through with major events and who turns out to be either a villain or a hero, but the world is inherently more complex than the narratives we impose upon it, just as the reality of experience is inherently more complex than the language we use to describe that reality.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.”

“Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.”

Then again, that was my name on it.

This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.”
― William James

“In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World