Rob Lund > Rob's Quotes

“If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

“To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

“When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.”
― Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus

“One night, during a storm, an engineer named W. W. Bradfield was sitting at the Wimereux transmitter, when suddenly the door to the room crashed open. In the portal stood a man disheveled by the storm and apparently experiencing some form of internal agony. He blamed the transmissions and shouted that they must stop. The revolver in his hand imparted a certain added gravity. Bradfield responded with the calm of a watchmaker. He told the intruder he understood his problem and that his experience was not unusual. He was in luck, however, Bradfield said, for he had “come to the only man alive who could cure him.” This would require an “electrical inoculation,” after which, Bradfield promised, he “would be immune to electro-magnetic waves for the rest of his life.” The man consented. Bradfield instructed him that for his own safety he must first remove from his person anything made of metal, including coins, timepieces, and of course the revolver in his hand. The intruder obliged, at which point Bradfield gave him a potent electrical shock, not so powerful as to kill him, but certainly enough to command his attention. The man left, convinced that he was indeed cured.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Now, God isn’t something I believe in—it’s something I feel all of us soaking in.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond. To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same? Watching, by definition, is different from doing.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“That's how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too - not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

“Being in our lives *as they are* is probably one of the most common struggles people have.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

“Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.”
― Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

“It doesn't matter that she shouldn't, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbour the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching. While it is alive like a tree, it is growing; while it contains itself, it is a multitude. Its directions are unpredictable; it obeys its own laws. No one can observe the acorn and extrapolate each vein in each leaf of the oak crown. The closer you look, the more various it becomes. However complex you think it is, it is more complex than that. Like the rivers to the ocean, like the lightning strike, it is obscene and uncontained.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“I wanted to fall too, more than anything. But when my turn came and the pastor pushed at my forehead and the deacons stood behind me at the ready, my legs refused to give out. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to put my thoughts to sleep. I knew that if I could just let go, then I could get the blessing too. But my mind darted around and I couldn't get a handle on it… And then the thought flashed through my head: maybe I couldn’t fall because my belief wasn't pure; it was salt and pepper mixed together. I had all these nagging questions and doubts, and that must have been why the Spirit passed me by.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“There was so much we wanted in that moment. We wanted to tap into the force that spun mountains and oceans out of air and take it into us. We wanted to know all the names for God. We wanted to speak in a language we couldn't understand. We wanted to burn away our old selves and peel off the burned skin and find new skin there. We wanted to grow like seeds in the light of God's all-encompassing presence. We wanted to make heaven here on the earth. We wanted to confront evil and blot it out. We wanted to be bigger than any single one of us could be on our own. We wanted to be pure.”
― Jessica Wilbanks

“As hundreds of people swayed to the soft and guitars, lifting their hands to the Lord and murmuring praise under their breath, a woman with low hoarse voice delivered a word over the church. She claimed, years from that day, the congregation would triple and need to move yet again. The news traveled like electricity around that mauve sanctuary, and everyone around me squeezed their eyes closed and murmured their gratitude to God. Their voices rose again and I knew more prophecies were coming. But my right temple began to throb, and the sanctuary started to feel less like a temple and more like a cage. A refrain echoed and buzzed in my head: None of this is true.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“When I received my prayer language, it felt like proof the Holy Spirit had X-rayed my life from up in heaven and called it good. It was my key to the kingdom, my guarantee that when the seventh trumpet sounded and Jesus returned in a cloud of glory, I'd be summoned up to meet the faithful. But now, four years later, I was ready to turn that key in. It had become too heavy. If I kept carrying it around, then I couldn't pick up anything else. So I sat there in the bathroom at that church in Baltimore and whispered to God that I was bowing out. To soften the blow and make it less terrifying, I told God I was taking a sabbatical from believing. A break. I'd probably be back, but for now I needed to go off on my own.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss