Lin Hansen > Lin's Quotes

“If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter.”
― Anchee Min, Red Azalea: A Memoir

“I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“On many counts, taking a boy like Rudy Steiner was robbery--so much life, so much to live for--yet somehow, I'm certain he would have loved to see the frightening rubble and the swelling of the sky on the night he passed away. He'd have cried and turned and smiled if only he could have seen the book thief on her hands and knees, next to his decimated body. He'd have been glad to witness her kissing his dusty, bomb-hit lips.
Yes, I know it.
In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He'd have loved it all right.
You see?
Even death has a heart.”
― Markus Zusak (The Book Thief), The Book Thief

“She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen.

With wonder, she smiled.

That such a room existed!”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“This is the cycle of a dynamic society. Equality is never a final state, democracy never a stable equilibrium: they are processes, they are struggles. Our task is now to recognize that that struggle is ours.”
― Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import...But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal”
― Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task.”
― Christopher Hayes

“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Map Your Own Journey Go on your own journey. Don’t let others hold you back; don’t hold them back. Don’t judge their journey, and don’t let them judge yours. All persons are free to have the experiences their souls lead them to.”
― Melody Beattie, Journey to the Heart: Daily Reflections for Spiritual Growth, Embracing Creativity, and Discovering Your True Purpose

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“But these American women! They had opinions, which they didn’t hesitate to offer—and the men listened. They joined their husbands at social gatherings and official ceremonies. They presided at table. Men gave up their seats for women, doffed their hats to them, made way for them on the sidewalk, fetched and carried for them. In public. Clearly, American women had a happier lot than their Japanese sisters. Why? The answer, Kuroda concluded, was education.”
― Janice P. Nimura, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back

“Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.”
― Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”
― George Saunders

“Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all. And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“If the Constitution were really the triumph of reason over darkness, as it is often treated, it probably wouldn’t have failed so miserably that a devastating civil war would break out less than one hundred years later. But that happened. And if the fixes applied to the Constitution after that war ended in 1865 were so redemptive, I imagine that my mother—born in 1950 in Mississippi—would have been allowed to go inside her ostensibly “public” library while she was growing up, which of course she was not.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Minorities or women have never held a majority in either chamber of Congress, or on the Supreme Court, and there has been only one nonwhite president of the United States in American history. White people got so pissed off at that they replaced Barack Obama with a bigoted con man who questioned whether the Black president was even born in this country, and when their guy lost the next election, his people tried to start a coup.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.”
― David McCullough

“To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."

[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]”
― David McCullough

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)”
― David McCullough

“History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI

“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.” A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Three Catholic priests are having dinner: a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit. Suddenly the lights go out. The Franciscan says, “Let us welcome Sister Darkness and wait patiently for Brother Sunlight to return.” The Dominican says, “God gives us the darkness of ignorance so that we might, by contrast, discern the light of truth.” The Jesuit finds a flashlight and goes downstairs to flip the breaker.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Recent studies of recreational cyclists aged fifty-five to seventy-nine suggest they have the capacity to do everyday tasks very easily and efficiently because nearly all parts of their body are in remarkably good condition.15 The cyclists also scored high on tests measuring mental agility, mental health, and quality of life.”
― Sanjay Gupta, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age