Rhoda Janzen > Quotes

“In my opinion, sexiness comes down to three things: chemistry, sense of humor, and treatment of waitstaff at restaurants.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?”
― Rhoda Janzen

“I think maybe I'd still nod and smile and have lunch with him. I think maybe I'd still go to the Noam Chomsky documentary later that evening. And maybe I'd even marry him a couple of weeks later. Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“I've come to believe that virtue isn’t a condition of character. It’s an elected action. It’s a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we’ll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“The idea is that the woman's heritage and background are just as important as the man's. Many women see taking a man's name as a gesture of symbolic oppression. It's like saying to the woman, 'Who you are as a person isn't as important as who I am.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“Call me old-fashioned, but whenever I see those wire-fortified ribbons, I have the secret stab of nostalgia for old-timey ribbon, the kind whose ends flop like spaniel ears. I'm suspicious of unnaturally perky ribbon.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“When you're young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn't do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship - with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community.”
― Rhoda Janzen

“It was after Nick had left me that I learned the lesson: its when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“Granny panties. White as a flag, but with no surrender.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“Sometimes you can just feel a person's decency in the same way that
sometimes you can intuit a lack of it. Phil had the air of a man who is fully attentively engaged Josh Hannah's first fiance had the air of a man trying not to look at his watch. Phil consistently interested himself in the lives of others Josh talked about himself. Phil looked at my sister with tenderness and humor Josh looked at her
as if she were an especially persistent gnat.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“Phil and Hannah had decided that Christian guilt was better than bad math”
― rhoda janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“An Americentric worldview, they believed, was incompatible with Christian values on the grounds that God loved all nations equally.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

“What I want to measure, what I can control, is my own response to life's challenges.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

“I'm not really a chicken-patty kinda girl," I said.”
― Rhoda Janzen

“I would rather get a PhD than stand to reach for toilet paper. Though some readers might emphasize the similarities between the two activities.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Does This Church Make Me Look Fat?: A Mennonite Finds Faith, Meets Mr. Right, and Solves Her Lady Problems

“It’s a little old-fashioned. The idea is that the woman’s heritage and background are just as important as the man’s. Many women see taking a man’s name as a gesture of symbolic oppression. It’s like saying to the woman, ‘Who you are as a person isn’t as important as who I am.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

“As a people, we are pale as pork chops, flavored by centuries of inbreeding and shame.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

“This was as true and sweet as ice cream in December. We each had our different priorities. If you held them lightly and used a plastic spoon they were nothing to get stuck on.”
― Rhoda Janzen, Does This Church Make Me Look Fat?: A Mennonite Finds Faith, Meets Mr. Right, and Solves Her Lady Problems