Tamara > Tamara's Quotes

“Polite make-believe is weary business,”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“Men can’t bear what women must. They jump to cry insanity as cause for a woman’s unhappiness; the utterance of the unutterable must be dementia.”
― Deb Spera, Call Your Daughter Home

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow. We save those we can.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“The musicals were “pastries designed to placate the impoverished with daydreams of unattainable bliss.” The horror movies were “sleights of hand in which the fears of the workingman have been displaced by those of pretty girls.” The vaudevillian comedies were “preposterous narcotics.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“devious propaganda of all: fables in which evil is represented by collectives who rustle and rob; while virtue is a lone individual who risks his life to defend the sanctity of someone else’s private property. In sum? “Hollywood is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it. But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of supreme lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of a bold new life that we had been meant to lead all along.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project