Jeanne Marie Laskas > Quotes

“Dreams are matters of the heart, things that pull you along as if they have hooked you someplace deep inside.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm

“You can make your life so much larger simply be acknowledging everyone else's.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas

“Chaos, I think, is youth. Youth at any age. Because as long as you have chaos, you are free of responsibility. When you are in chaos, when you don't know what's going on, when you're an ignorant dreamer...when you're floating through space like that, you aren't supposed to get anything right, you aren't supposed to make sense, you're supposed to be...amused,,,and aware. It can't go on. Not unless you choose that life. A life of never settling down, never making a claim on who you are, who you love... Once you make those claims you become accountable. You have to get to work...Dreams end. That's one thing I'm discovering.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm

“The God I know isn't some authoritarian dictator with a rule book written in especially cryptic prose able to be deciphered by only one chosen group. The God I know is creative and hilarious and humble and constantly revising. Right about now He's wishing America would pipe down and bow off the world stage for a while and get a good nap and then, with a fresh head, reconsider just about everything.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Growing Girls: The Mother of All Adventures

“And I don't think anybody ever gets over loss. I think you get through it. You let it get through you.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm

“It says the American people are full of goodness and wisdom, and you just have to be paying attention. And sometimes that's hard to do when you're inside this bubble, but this was a little portal through which I could remind myself of that every day. The letters are beautiful, aren't they? -Obama”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope

“Now, brooder is an interesting word. People who worry a lot in silence are known as brooders. But then again so is a hen sitting on her eggs. The more I get to know chickens, the more I realize half our language comes from chickens. Well, not half. But an awful lot considering this isn't Latin or anything. Cooped up. Egghead. Hatch a plan. Henpecked. Pecker. Cock. Chickenshit. Chicken-scratch. A lot of chicken words are meant to deliver attitude, which isn't surprising to me now that I have chickens. Chickens aren't background animals like fish or sheep or horses. Chickens are in-your-face animals. Chickens if you have them, come to bracket your days. The rooster hollers all morning, and then in the evening the hens have left you their mysterious gift of eggs.

Silkies are said to be excellent brooders, to have a tendency toward "broodiness." This, too, is usually meant as a compliment.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Growing Girls: The Mother of All Adventures

“Lately, in this city I love, this neighborhood I love, all I seem to notice are the intrusions. Hot Air. Reeking garbage. Lunatic neighbors...I am inventing filters. Air filters. Stinking garbage filters. Lunatic-neighbor filters... Sometimes I imagine plugging a big air conditioner to the front of my head so I can block the rest of the world out. That's not right.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm

“The neighbor's flock has taken advantage of the chaos, and I think that's pretty smart.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm

“If I'm going to be working out here in a place that at least feels like the middle of nowhere, I'm going to need access to the outside world. It's important to have access. Solitude is one thing, but you could turn into the Unabomber if you don't have some connection to people.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas

“The league lied. They had the evidence and chose to ignore it. They had the evidence at least since 2005, when one unlikely scientist, a man from nowhere who would not go away, who would not back down, found proof.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“Just because politicians, scientists, and business execs are raging about it, and newspaper headlines are screaming it, doesn’t mean the message sticks—or that people care. It takes more than that to change a culture. In”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“What happens in stories is what happens in stories: the telling and retelling simplify and reduce. History gets written in the wind that keeps blowing; if it’s not too strong you don’t even notice it. The lights are bright and there’s so much shouting and scrambling.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“Brooding is more something I do when I'm working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We've worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos.

Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never though of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything better or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me.

Brand new.

News.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Growing Girls: The Mother of All Adventures

“motherfucking cocksucking ass-kissing bastard.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Growing Girls: The Mother of All Adventures

“I do think there’s a mind-set—no matter how much we may want to deny it in this country—about the perception of blackness. And sometimes it’s a subconscious mind-set. Where anything associated with blackness has a negative connotation. This mind-set has a very fundamental assumption. A false assumption that black people cannot be intelligent. I”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“shake”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work

“Mike Kelleher from Obama’s Senate office was the person who stepped up to tackle the mess…
He built the staff, drew up a ten-page strategic plan for the mail-room, wrote algorithms for a mail coding system, set up a casework decision tree, assembled a library of policy-response letters, and developed quality-control manuals.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope

“Extreme corruption steals our dignity from us as human beings and degrades us to the level of animals,”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“Solitude is a luxury for the lucky. For people who don’t have sick cats and lost ladybugs and very possibly dying loved ones to worry about. For people who don’t have to worry about getting their hands dirty with the everyday goo of ordinary suffering.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Fifty Acres and A Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on A Farm

“That love was God’s love. Where do you think love comes from? It comes from God, and it comes through other people.” I think about this. Usually I walk around thinking of love as a kind of gravity. Just one of those laws of nature, a force that has its way with you. I don’t tend to wonder where the law might have come from.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family

“Solitude helps you figure out where everybody else stops and you begin”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas

“Living people mess you up. Living people are messy.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“If it hurts so much that you have to bubble-wrap your body, maybe you should play something different.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“Depression isn’t a thing that lifts or disappears just because of a change of scenery. The voice follows you no matter where you go, reminding you that you are worthless.”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion

“My”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work

“long braids, used Ivory soap, and liked to stencil her walls with”
― Jeanne Marie Laskas, Fifty Acres and A Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on A Farm