Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Quotes

“I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity— one’s own and others’— but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving. ... Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Friends, no. But I would not waste my exertions cultivating anyone as an enemy.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“If one were HAPPY, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“If one knocks oneself out of one’s routine—and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs—then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Time only goes in that one direction.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Like many parents in middle age, he's quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The use of the passive voice to disguise one’s role in the making of a decision is imprecise and obfuscatory. You’re a better adman than that. Active verbs! Why not say ‘I refuse to pay you fairly’?”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“caelum, non animum mutant, for instance—climate may change, but not character—and”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Choice is an illusion promoted by the powerful.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The minute you see yourself you're forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“I do not eschew the shoulder pads and jewel tones I see on the mannequins, silly though they may be. Everything in fashion these days seems so childlike and bellicose, bright yet aggressive, a cute positivity that recasts every woman as a cross between a majorette and a Sherman tank.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Even then I'd begun to think—and to push away the thought—that committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk