Cheri Baker > Cheri's Quotes

“If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat. 'You don't have to understand it,' she said. 'It's mine.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Only time can heal what reason cannot.”
― Seneca

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
― Joe Klaas, The Twelve Steps to Happiness: A Practical Handbook for Understanding and Working the Twelve Step Programs for Alcoholism, Codependency, Eating Disorders, and Other Addictions

“I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Bodies wear out to remind us they are temporary, and force us to spend more thought on our spirits”
― Morgan Llywelyn, Bard: The Odyssey of the Irish

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both. ”
― James A. Michener

“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“we all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever," she said. "Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement."
"You and George didn't go back on your promises."
She laughed. "Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men." She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, "They've all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole lot different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and - well, the rest is none of your business."
"But people change," he said quietly.
"Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we've had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people." She flopped back against her chair. "Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I'm figuring something out now." She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn't have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he'd learned in a long time or the most discouraging. "Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest's vows by jeering at him when he can't live up to them, always and forever." She shivered and slumped suddenly, "But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do.”
― Stephen King, End of Watch

“Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“As writers we are always seeking support. First we should notice that we are already supported every moment. There is the earth below our feet and there is the air, filling our lungs and emptying them. We should begin from this when we need support. There is the sunlight coming through the window and the silence of the morning. Begin from these. Then turn to face a friend and feel how good it is when she says, “I love your work.” Believe her as you believe the floor will hold you up, the chair will let you sit.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

“On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“After all, hope is a form of planning.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“All movements need a few people who can’t be fired.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Now I see that the journey was never meant to lead to some new and improved version of me; that it has always been about coming home to who I already am.”
― Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment

“I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca