Daisy in a Hammock > Daisy in a Hammock's Quotes

“A great man is always willing to be little.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Truth has nothing to do with the number of people it convinces.”
― Paul Claudel

“We bear the consequences for what we have done to ourselves, and for the sin that rules this world. Jesus forgave the thief, but he didn't take him down off the cross.”
― Francine Rivers, A Voice in the Wind

“Tell me everything about this woman you once knew. Tell me everything she ever told you about Jesus of Nazareth."
Marcus saw the fever in his eyes. "Why?" he said, frowning. "Why does it matter?"
"Just tell me, Marcus Lucianus Valerian. Tell me everything. From the beginning. Let me decide for myself what matters."
And so Marcus did as he was asked. He gave in to his deep need to speak of Hadassah. And all the while he talked of her, he failed to see the irony in what he was doing. For as he told the story of a simple Judean slave girl, Marcus Lucianus Valerian, a Roman who didn't believe in anything, proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
― Francine Rivers, An Echo in the Darkness

“Hearts are made to be broken.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
― Mark Twain

“Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you
Little by little
If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me
For I shall already have forgotten you

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember
That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off to seek another land”
― Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems

“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers—not all of whom are modern . . . I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this— becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

“Cultivate your craft. Water it daily, pour some tender loving care into it, and watch it grow. Remember that a plant doesn’t sprout immediately. Be patient, and know that in life you will reap what you sow.”
― J.B. McGee

“Few realizations are as demoralizing as knowing that the only thing standing between you and what you want is yourself,”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“You are born, you grow up, you become a wife. But what if it wasn’t this way? What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like?”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“The first thing that struck me was how the single women of my acquaintance were exceptionally alert to the people around them, generous in their attention, ready to engage in conversation or share a joke. Having nobody to go home to at night had always seemed a sad and lonesome fate; now I saw that being forced to leave the house for human contact encourages a person to live more fully in the world. In the best instances, the result was an intricate lacework of friendships varying in intensity and closeness that could be, it seemed, just as sustaining as a nuclear family, and possibly more appealing.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“The question I’d long posed to myself—whether to be married or to be single—is a false binary. The space in which I’ve always wanted to live—indeed, where I have spend my adulthood—isn’t between those two poles, but beyond it. The choice between being married versus being single doesn’t even belong here in the twenty-first century.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Maeve, you wrote this to Tillie Olsen, who treasured it, and had it up on her studio wall. I copied it, and it’s now on the [bulletin] board over my desk.” The passage reads: I have been trying to think of the word to say to you that would never fail to lift you up when you are too tired or too sad [to] not be downcast. But I can think only of a reminder—you are all it has. You are all your work has. It has nobody else and never had anybody else. If you deny it hands and a voice, it will continue as it is, alive, but speechless and without hands. You know it has eyes and can see you, and you know how hopefully it watches you. But I am speaking of a soul that is timid but that longs to be known. When you are so sad that you “cannot work” there is always danger fear will enter in and begin withering around. A good way to remain on guard is to go to the window and watch the birds for an hour or two or three. It is very comforting to see their beaks opening and shutting. This is real friendship—the kind that takes another’s soul as seriously as one’s own. Aristotle considered it the highest order of love, philia, or “friendship love,” in which tending to somebody else’s welfare is central to our own flourishing.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Over the years I’ve noticed that only men use this phrase—“unlucky in love”—in reference exclusively to unmarried women, as if they can’t possibly comprehend that contentment or even happiness is possible without the centrality of a man.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Coupling, I realized, can encourage a fairly static way of being, with each partner exaggerating or repressing certain qualities in relation to the other’s.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“If a woman liked to play with words and set them in patterns and make pictures with them, and was taking care of herself and bothering nobody, and enjoyed her life without a lot of bawling children around, why shouldn’t she?”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“I wasn’t a woman who needed convincing that she wanted to be alone, but I did need help seeing clearly what that reality might look like, and evidence that there were indeed rewards to be gained if I was bold enough to pursue them—that,”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“The idea of love seemed an invasion,” she wrote. “I had thoughts to think, a craft to learn, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Didn’t she remember that being single is more than just following your whims—that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Generally, after three dates one of three things took place: 1) he’d express his lack of interest with a silent fade-out that made me go insane with anxiety; 2) I’d express my lack of interest with an overlong and tortured “it’s not you, it’s me” e-mail; 3) we’d devolve into a sexual entanglement that either was or wasn’t physically satisfying but invariably thrived on noncommunication. After a while it seemed that everyone I knew was tangled in several entanglements at a time, as if we were all becoming intertwined, like a giant rat king, our tails a knotted mass, our mouths gasping for air.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“How even I, “a dutiful daughter,” as Simone de Beauvoir once described her young self, was living a life so different from my mother’s; when she was my age she was married, about to become pregnant with me. I was beginning to think that this habit of mind—constantly tracing myself back to my mother, to where she’d begun and left off—wasn’t idiosyncratic, but something that many if not most women did, a feature of the female experience.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so simply into the collective female consciousness that we’re stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she’s living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Don't laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God's sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life, if for no other reason.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.”
― Elizabeth I, Collected Works

“Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.”
― Germaine Greer

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.”
― Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

“No one is born to courage, Juliet. Courage is a habit you develop after cowardice has gotten you nothing.”
― Sabrina Jeffries, A Dangerous Love

“Sympathy for the spinster. I'm perfectly content, thank you. And I refuse to be defined by my boyfriend. Or lack of. Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it's like you're free to get on with real life.”
― David Nicholls, One Day