Anna North > Quotes

“Knowledge can be very valuable... but only if people want it. If they don't, it can be worse than useless.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“When someone believes in something... you can't just take it away. You have to give them something to replace it.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“When I moved, the broker had told me there was something good for the brain about living near the sea, something about ions. But I often felt like the water was insulting me, like, "I'm beautiful and endless—what are you doing with your life?”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“And so I began my criminal career there in the house of God, with a leaky pen instead of a pistol and books instead of silver for my reward.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“It’s hard for me to talk about love,' she said. 'I think movies are the way I do that.”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“The point is, you live like I did, you start being able to spot what makes some people sink and other people swim. There’s a quality, I don’t even know how to describe it—sometimes it looks like luck and sometimes it looks like skill and sometimes it doesn’t look like either one. But you have it, I saw it when I met you. You’ve made a lot of mistakes, but you’re a good bet. You’ll swim.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“Maybe that was how you had to live, eventually—just let things be and never ask yourself if they were what you really wanted.”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Knowledge can be very valuable,” she said, “but only if people want it. If they don’t, it can be worse than useless.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“Hate, I saw, breeds a kind of closeness. I fell in step with him.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“People cry witchcraft whenever they don’t understand something”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“It’s like having everybody mispronounce your name, every day. And at first you try to correct them, but they keep fucking it up, and then you start to wonder if maybe you’re the one who’s wrong and that really is how to pronounce your name. And after a while you start to wonder if you even have a name. Are you even a person? Do you even exist? Who fucking knows?”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Maybe she had some sort of extraordinary quality, secret even to her. Maybe she did have the power to alter the things she'd always assumed she'd have to endure.”
― Anna North, America Pacifica

“Everybody in my family believed in ghosts, and my grandma said it wasn't just bad people who turned into them, it was bad deeds too.”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“But now when I think about that night, I think about something my stepdad once said when my mom yelled at him for quitting AA. He just told her in this sad, quiet voice, "Sometimes the sickest part of me just seems like the truest part.”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Mama says at every birth, death is in the room. You can try to ignore it, or you can acknowledge it, and greet it like a guest, and then you won’t be so afraid anymore.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“If they take you, keep your head up. Don't beg for your life. Don't confess to any sin. If you die without shame, the shame is all theirs.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“Then I could feel the quiet that only comes with knowing what you need to know. And I could teach other people what I knew.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“What does He want from us?” I asked. The Kid bent close to me then, until our foreheads were touching. “He will make you father of many nations, Ada,” the Kid said. “Watch and see.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“She looked the way people look at that time in their relationship when they’re absolutely sure the other person loves them and they haven’t started to love that person any less yet.”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“When someone believes in something,” Mama said, “you can’t just take it away. You have to give them something to replace it. And since I don’t know what makes women barren, I’ve got nothing to give.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“Knowledge can be very valuable, but only if people want it. If they don't, it can be worse than useless.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“I couldn't put aside my anger. Or maybe I could, but I don't want to.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“She’d taken one of me when we were both in high school that I still love—I’m sitting on our front steps eating an ice cream sandwich, and I look more like myself than I’ve ever looked in any mirror, a little bit angry but a little bit hopeful, too, like I’m looking forward to not being mad.”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Just because I'm old, everyone's always so surprised when I know anything about the world. See how you like it when you're my age and everyone treats you like a baby.”
― Anna North, Bog Queen

“just felt like I’d slipped into some other universe, one that had even less justice than the one I’d grown up in. I”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“When a child dies, or two people in love can’t conceive, or a man loses his wife in childbirth—these things aren’t bearable, Ada, not without help. But if you know why it happened, if you have someone or somebody to blame, then sometimes that’s enough to keep going.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“I hated my uselessness, the way my body had taken my family and my calling from me.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“Mama says at every birth, death is in the room. You can try to ignore it, or you can acknowledge it, and greet it like a guest, and then you won't be so afraid anymore."
Bee looked skeptical.
"How do you greet it? 'Hello, Death'?"
"She pictures the last patient she lost," I said. "The death that's freshest in her mind. She pictures that woman standing right there in the room with her. She looks the woman up and down. She doesn't say anything, but sometimes she gives a little nod. Then she's ready for the birth.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“deep down I didn’t like saying no to people.”
― Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ Cassie. ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow’ ”—the Kid dipped Cassie low and her flower crown slid into the dirt—“ ‘for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”
― Anna North, Outlawed