Clare > Clare's Quotes

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The ban against tall buildings was finally lifted in 1957. Nothing much happened at first; downtown remained stunted compared to most other cities of its size. As developer Robert Maguire put it, Los Angeles seemed destined to be a city “just ten stories high, all over hell and gone.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“One morning, a real estate developer named Robert Maguire came for a meeting at the ARCO offices. He stood by a window and looked down on the library and the shambles it was becoming. At that moment, he made a decision to do what he could to fix it.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Maguire is one of the most successful real estate developers in the city. Many of his biggest projects were downtown. Like many people, including the architectural preservationists who had been so instrumental in keeping the library intact so far, Maguire hoped Los Angeles would develop a city center that actually felt like a city center. A blighted library in the middle of it wouldn’t do. He was used to building new things, but he loved the Goodhue Building and was committed to the idea of saving and rehabilitating it. He also knew that ARCO, then a major corporate and philanthropic force in Los Angeles, favored saving the original building. Lodwrick Cook, the ARCO chairman, didn’t want a skyscraper replacing the library and blocking his view, and Robert Anderson, ARCO’s CEO, was a devotee of vintage architecture.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head

“Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.”
― Martha Wells, Network Effect

“A reading major, that’s what he wants. No response papers, no exams, no analysis, just the reading.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“When I meet people and hear where they’re from I orient them in my mind by the nearest unsolved crime.”
― Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

“Time sands the edges of the injuries, but they never lose their hold. A nameless syndrome circulates permanently through the body, sometimes long dormant, other times radiating powerful waves of pain and fear.”
― Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

“Thus it came about that the conquerors grew afraid of the conquered and their nerves wore thin and they shot at shadows in the night.”
― John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down

“This book is about the history and the making and the bookness of all those books, the weighty, complicated, inviting artifacts that humanity has been writing, printing, and binding for more than fifteen hundred years.”
― Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time

“Each spring the robins nesting in our cherry tree attack the side mirror of our car as if it were a rival, pecking furiously at their own reflections while streaking the door with guano. But who among us hasn’t been toppled by our vanity or made an enemy of our own image?”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds

“For a minute the whole scene quivered, then I saw it clear, in the pure, strong colours of childhood, as if a gap had been torn here in some veil that dulls the world to older eyes.”
― Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited

“Nothing touched by empire stays clean,”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sundered, but shall be the prize of the gods’ gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Personally, I do not enjoy science fiction when it violates the laws of physics; I like science and I like fiction but only when they are honest, without pretensions. Professionally, I worry that sensationalized depictions of aliens have led to a popular and scientific culture in which it is acceptable to laugh off many serious discussions of alien life even when the evidence clearly indicates that this is a topic worthy of discussion; indeed, one that we ought to be discussing now more than ever.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth – A New York Times Bestselling Science Book on the Oumuamua Mystery and Alien Technology from Harvard's Top Astronomer

“The data we confront tells us that ‘Oumuamua was a luminous, thin disk at the LSR, and when it encountered the gravitational pull of the Sun, it deviated from a trajectory explicable by gravity alone, and it did so without visible outgassing or disintegration. These data points can be summed up as follows: ‘Oumuamua was statistically a wild outlier.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth – A New York Times Bestselling Science Book on the Oumuamua Mystery and Alien Technology from Harvard's Top Astronomer

“As it happens, the Sun-Earth system is anomalous in two clear respects. First, the Sun’s mass—330,000 times that of Earth—makes it more massive than 95 percent of all known stars. And while this does not rule out our interest in searching for life on planets orbiting more statistically average stars, given that we have limited resources of time and money, it encourages us to look for stars that are especially massive, like the one that sustains us.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth – A New York Times Bestselling Science Book on the Oumuamua Mystery and Alien Technology from Harvard's Top Astronomer

“Youth is a matter not of biological age but of attitude. It is what makes one person willing to open up new frontiers of scientific discovery while others try to stay within the traditional borders.”
― Avi Loeb, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth – A New York Times Bestselling Science Book on the Oumuamua Mystery and Alien Technology from Harvard's Top Astronomer

“Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water. Swimming can enable survival in ways beyond the physical.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Buoyancy, floating, weightlessness. Freedom. These are the words we use to talk about swimming. Is it a coincidence that this is also the language we use to talk about the lightness of being, the wellness of being, that we strive for in this corporeal world?”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Over time, swimming has shifted from mere mechanics and survival—a military skill, practiced by men—to achieve a more intangible significance: a form of recreation, a pleasure, something that can sharpen your spiritual as well as physical health. This idea of swimming for wellness, emotional resonance, whole personhood, rings true to me. The physical is intertwined with the psychological.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Hospital patients recovering from heart surgery have been found to need less pain medication when there are nature scenes at the foot of their beds; an image that includes water is even more effective than an image of an enclosed forest in reducing anxiety during the post-operative period.”
― Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

“Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United States had the nerve to make it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Slavitt renamed the plan “Victory over COVID-19” and presented it to Kushner as his own.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story