Cyndi > Cyndi's Quotes

“I am not important. If I take a break, no one dies. And this is A Good Thing.”
― Helen Russell, The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country

“Wider lanes were, obviously, safer than narrower ones. Only they’re not. This time, the problem with the cost-benefit equation wasn’t a faulty premise, but the data itself. In order to test the wider-lanes-are-safer-lanes hypothesis, I studied every crash that occurred on the bridge over a three-year period and marked each one on a map. If that notion had been true, I reasoned, more crashes would have occurred where the lanes were narrowest, that is, at the towers. Just the opposite turned out to be the case. The towers, it turned out, were the safest places on the entire bridge; my explanation is that when lanes get very narrow motorists drive more carefully. Even though every traffic engineer in the country had been taught the gospel of wider lanes, the opposite appeared to be true: “grossly substandard lanes seemed to be the safest of all.” This was the traffic engineering equivalent of saying the Earth was round when the masses knew it was flat. Still, most engineers do not accept this fact.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“What this means in road (and bridge, and tunnel) building is not just obvious but as well documented as anything in transportation engineering: “If you build it, they will come.” If you build more lanes on the expressway, more cars and trucks will use it. If you’re lucky, congestion remains as bad as it was before you spent $50 million trying to relieve it; if you’re not, it gets worse.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.
The book needs you.”
― Gary Paulsen, The Winter Room

“Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.”
― Beverly Cleary, The Mouse and the Motorcycle

“Solitude takes time, and caregivers to children have no time. Our children demand attention and need care. They ask questions and parents must answer. The number of decisions that go into a week of parenting astonishes me. Women have known for centuries what I have just discovered: going to work every day is far easier than staying home raising children...thoughtful parenting requires time to think, and parents of young children do not have time to think...One middle-aged female writing student spoke to me of feeling she lacked the freedom to "play hooky in nature"; it is an act of leisure men indulge in while women stay at home, keeping domestic life in order. Men often can justify poking around in the woods as a part of their profession, or as part of an acceptably manly activity like hunting or fishing. Women, for generations circumscribed by conventional values, must purposefully create opportunities for solitude, for exploration of nature or ideas, for writing.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places

“If building roads actually resulted in less traffic, then surely after sixty years of interstate highway construction we would all be cruising at highway speed.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Reversing the atrophy afflicting our city streets requires a change-based urbanism that creates short-term results—results that can create new expectations and demand for more projects.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures

“Of course, Moomintrolls don't wear clothes, except sometimes in bed.”
― Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind.”
― Fred Rogers, Life's Journeys According to Mister Rogers: Things to Remember Along the Way

“Even potted plants got to be a responsibility, like everything else you took care of that couldn't make decisions for itself.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“If anything, this is a conspiracy of good intentions, convincing ourselves in circles that we are doing just enough not to require any uncomfortable action, replacing the terror of a gargantuan world with a feeling of control.”
― Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

“I think instead [of happiness] we should be working for contentment... an inner sense of fulfillment that's relatively independent of external circumstances.”
― Andrew Weil

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“Anyone who has ever been able to sustain good work has had at least one person--and often many--who have believed in him or her. We just don't get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others.”
― Fred Rogers

“Most of all I remember that what begins with drums and fife, flags and bunting, becomes too swiftly a long and grey winter of the spirit.”
― Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War

“The goal is to feel alive, even if the primary proof is the chattering of your teeth.”
― Dee Williams, The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir