Beth > Beth's Quotes

“I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth. Unfortunately, undiluted truth was as affordable as eighteen-year-old single malt scotch. What about those who have not learned the best of what was thought and said?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don’t understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars—many of which this country has had a hand in.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Hello, Dearest. I’m so glad it’s you!” I’ve come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive.”
― Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

“I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“This is not a Western idea, but fathers and sons arrive at that relationship only by claiming that relationship: that is, by paying for it. If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. (But to pursue this further carries us far beyond the confines of the present discussion.)”
― James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

“replied, there is more. There is the unseen, waiting to be seen, existing only in the spaces we admit we do not see yet.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Pet

“When I creep into our bed, there is the joy and relief of a person entering a secret dimension. Here, I shall be useless. The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“I like this job. I can’t right now think of a better purpose in life than to be a teacher. To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it. It isn’t playing the lute for Shakespeare, or the piano at Ciro’s, but it’s something as good. And goodness has its own kind of harmony.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“But in this notebook I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.”
― Percival Everett, James