Gladis Durrett > Gladis's Quotes

“When we show kindness to others, we shouldn’t be expecting anything in return. Kindness is all about giving, and it has nothing to do with getting.”
― Art Rios, Let's Talk: ...About Making Your Life Exciting, Easier, And Exceptional

“Love is a necessity, just as lust is. Two instincts we modern humans have turned into our strongest emotions. Love gives us the desire to bond with a partner long enough to care for our children to an age when they can fend for themselves. Lust gives us the will to want to reproduce in the first place. These instincts are so deeply ingrained in our psyche that even with our advanced brains, they still govern us. We are now, for the most part, intelligent enough to decide who we want to love or have sex with. We can even control whether or not that sex results in offspring, but we can’t just ignore those instincts. From the simplest person to the most powerful kings, queens and presidents, our our lives are still governed by those two emotions.”
― D.S. Smith, Unparalleled

“There comes a point in time when we must acknowledge that we are more than our nationality, and we are bigger than our ethnicity. There comes a time when we have an aha moment. What is that aha moment? It's sort of like a revelation. A revelation is when we put all the pieces together to see the bigger picture. When we see the bigger picture, we can see ourselves through the realm of reality and truth. The truth is we belong to a blood family that is connected to a tribal community, and this community is big and bright and bold with life, and we should be proud of the ties to blood that each of us has. We should not play small and reduce our human nature—for we are all connected. We belong to something bigger and more expansive. We belong to life itself. Always remember that you are more than an American (as wonderfully dramatic as that can be). Together, we make up the collective of great. ...And this is good.”
― Janine Myung Ja, Adoption Stories

“I could leave it no longer. No-one had taken steps to ensure that he would reach Herron. I had to do it myself. I felt cold at the idea that I had almost decided that it was pointless seeking truths in Rael’s past. I had almost not been here and then he would never have lived in Herron. My life had almost not happened – everyone who had ever lived in Herron had almost not lived - more lost possibilities in the endless possibilities floating in the universe. It was terrifying to me, although I suspected the universe was resigned.”
― Aaron D. Key, Damon Ich

“e scendeva velocemente lungo le colonnine della veranda e di tanto in tanto il cavallo sporgeva il muso”
― Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Calzelunghe

“Power controlled or abridged is almost always the rival and enemy of that power by which it is controlled or abridged. This simple proposition will teach us how little reason there is to expect, that the persons intrusted with the administration of the affairs of the particular members of a confederacy will at all times be ready, with perfect good-humor, and an unbiased regard to the public weal, to execute the resolutions or decrees of the general authority. The reverse of this results from the constitution of human nature. If, therefore, the measures of the Confederacy cannot be executed without the intervention of the particular administrations, there will be little prospect of their being executed at all. The rulers of the respective members, whether they have a constitutional right to do it or not, will undertake to judge of the propriety of the measures themselves. They will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate interests or aims; the momentary conveniences or inconveniences that would attend its adoption. All this will be done; and in a spirit of interested and suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state, which is essential to a right judgment, and with that strong predilection in favor of local objects, which can hardly fail to mislead the decision.”
― Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers

“It Is Our Duty To Remember”
― Steve Snyder, Shot Down: The True Story of Pilot Howard Snyder and the Crew of the B-17 Susan Ruth

“I know how difficult it can be when the image you've had of something doesn't match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“الراشدون يحبون الأرقام. وحين تحدثهم عن صديق جديد، فهم لا يسألونك قطّ عن الأمور الجوهريّة. لا يقولون لك أبداً "كيف هي رنّة صوته؟ ما هي ألعابه المفضّلة؟ هل يجمع الفراشات؟" بل يسألونك: "كم عمره؟ كم عدد إخوته؟ ما وزنه؟ كم دخل أبيه؟ وعندها فقط يظنون أنهم عرفوه.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“She wrote me a letter (Joan,1941) asking,"How can I read it?,Its so hard." I told her to start at the beginning and read as far as you can get until you're lost. Then start again at the beginning and keep working through until you can understand the whole book. And thats what she did”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Starting a long way off the true point by loops and zigags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.”
― George Elliott

“provision”
― Jacob Grimm, The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales

“Everyone’s past, I try to rationalize, is nothing more than the collection of memories they choose to remember.”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“Were she to decide fully to live here in Black Cove unto death, she believed she would erect towers on the ridge marking the south and north points of the sun's annual swing. It would be a great pleasure year after year to watch with anticipation as the sun drew nigh to the notch and then on a specified day fell into it and then rose out of it and retraced its path. Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Le tengo constantemente en mi pensamiento, aunque no siempre como una cosa agradable. Tampoco yo me agrado siempre de mí misma. No hables más de separarnos, porque eso es irrealizable.”
― Emily Brontë, Cumbres borrascosas

“I’ll promise to think twice before I take any important step you seriously disapprove of.”
― Anne Brontë

“People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“When would he ever learn to stop saying “Look” to a man who had no eyes?”
― Lois Lowry, Messenger

“Cinder has a bit of a crush on him,” Thorne stage-whispered. “Don’t we all?” said Iko.”
― Marissa Meyer, Scarlet

“And I have no control over which yesterdays I keep and which ones get deleted. This disease will not be bargained with. I can't offer it the names of the US presidents in exchange for the names of my children. I can't give it the names of state capitals and keep the memories of my husband.
...My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I'll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I'll forget it some tomorrow doesn't mean that I didn't live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn't mean that today doesn't matter.”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this is what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway. ”
― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

“He’s not my dad,” Kaira said. “Just because he married my— As soon as I turn eighteen I’m firing his ass! Then I’ll call you.”
― Louis Sachar, Small Steps

“I will hate the man you choose because he is not me, and love him if he makes you smile. No woman deserves the sure knowledge of widow’s black as her brideprice, you least of all.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“So that's who Finnick loves, I think. Not his string of fancy lovers in the Capitol. But a poor, mad girl back home. ”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“When you are an addict and you get caught, you always seem to be at your lowest point.”
― Andrew Mann, Such Unfortunates

“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”
― Benjamin Franklin