Elizabeth Wolf > Elizabeth's Quotes

“What do you have there?” he asked, always interested to discover what a person was reading, for he believed it was possible to see inside a person’s soul once you knew which books mattered to them.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

“Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It’s all preposterous. That’s why we have novels. To make sense of things.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

“In every fairy tale the girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

“Some people are who you think they are. Some people hide the wolf inside of them, but you can hear them howl.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

“There is only one perfect child in the world and every mother has him.”
― Lisa See, China Dolls

“You cannot refuse to eat just because there's a chance of being choked.”
― Lisa See, China Dolls

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person.”
― Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

“The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend

“The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a light-bulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody's son.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“That real mother, the mother that you get, you've got to love her, there's no choice. She is the mother you needed. She gave you strength, either because she loved you well or because she loved you poorly. She gave you your mission.
It's the dream mother that you have to let go of. The one you pined for, the one you thought your decency promised you. She's the one you've got to bury.
She's a mirage. She'll only break your heart.”
― Amity Gaige, Heartwood

“The world and its people are too much for me.
I am crushed between empathy and impotence.
I don't think I'm important. Not at all!
In fact, I am embarrassingly insubstantial.
Then why was I given this heart?
It is so much more than I need.”
― Amity Gaige, Heartwood

“Every human being imagines, but few disclose. Children are quick to share their strangest thoughts and inventions. They cease to do so only after the shaming or baffled reactions of adults, portraits of which the child hangs on her inner walls, until at last, she closes the gallery.”
― Amity Gaige, Heartwood

“It may be dangerous to be unfathered, exposed on the animal plain, but life unmothered is simply unlivable. I mean, why go on?”
― Amity Gaige, Heartwood

“Ocean waves begin their journey thousands of miles out at sea. Their form, size, and shape come from the speed of prevailing winds in the atmosphere, the power of currents hidden beneath the sea, and their “long fetch”—the distance between a wave’s point of origin and its point of arrival… Events that seem to appear in the present from out of nowhere in actuality have a long history behind them. George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark Part One”
― Marjan Kamali, The Lion Women of Tehran

“Freedom has no musts.”
― Marjan Kamali, The Lion Women of Tehran

“Doesn’t matter who owns the rug workshops,” Homa went on. “It’s the women who do the knotting. It’s women doing the weaving. The art of Iranian women is scattered throughout the world. Their work is everywhere.”
― Marjan Kamali, The Lion Women of Tehran

“The pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg