Abigail > Abigail's Quotes

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.”
― Saul Bellow

“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
― Studs Terkel

“Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.”
― Studs Terkel

“What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.”
― Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

“Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.”
― Studs Terkel, Chicago

“I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful.”
― Studs Terkel

“I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.”
― Marlon James

“...Love isn’t saying, I love you but calling to say, did you eat”
― Marlon James