Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“the Swiss looked down upon those from the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And yet the Swiss were the most tolerant people in other ways; they had the most lenient university admissions for women, for example. It was a confusing contradiction. Signaling”
― Marie Benedict, The Other Einstein

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Besides, the big things in life do not present themselves as such. They come in the quiet, ordinary moments-- a phone call, a letter-- they come when we are not looking, without clues, without warning, and that is why they floor us. And it can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things: that a small moment can sit side by side with a big one, and become part of the same.”
― Rachel Joyce, Perfect

“No one knows how to be normal, Jim. We’re all just trying our best. Sometimes we don’t have to think about it and other times it’s like running after a bus that’s already halfway down the street.”
― Rachel Joyce, Perfect

“Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"...
"It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March.

.........

I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world...I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.

I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness...Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.

I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.

I am thawing.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“...he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope....”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“We are all migrants through time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“Another morning comes. It always does. Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with. *”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“A retired rabbi—the friend of a friend—writes me an email out of the blue about how he lost his mother when he was nine years old. In the message, he lists all the things he remembers about his mom and all the ways she remains in his life: her favorite flower, the books she read him, her sense of humor. “She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence that can never be replaced.” His words are a gift that I pull out some nights and let swirl through the room, brush over my skin like a tincture.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“I am trying to know myself. I want a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be. It’s hard: I am not done becoming me. I am still in the works. I still aim to be softer in some places, firmer in others.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“The biggest reason for our existence is to feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Lebo Grand

“Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.”
― John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

“Jodie had taught her that the female firefly flickers the light under her tail to signal to the male that she's ready to mate. Each species of firefly has its own language of flashes. As Kya watched, some females signed dot, dot, dot, dash, flying a zigzag dance, while others flashed dash, dash, dot in a different dance pattern. The males, of course, knew the signals of their species and flew only to those females. Then, as Jodie had put it, they rubbed their bottoms together like most things did, so they could produce young.

Suddenly Kya sat up and paid attention: one of the females had changed her code. First she flashed the proper sequence of dashes and dots, attracting a male of her species, and they mated. Then she flickered a different signal, and a male of a different species flew to her. Reading her message, the second male was convinced he'd found a willing female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate. But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings.

Kya watched others. The females all got what they wanted – first a mate, then a meal – just by changing their signals.

Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“One of the most memorably unexpected events I experienced in the course of doing this book came in a dissection room at the University of Nottingham in England when a professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere (about whom much more in due course) gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick from the arm of a cadaver. It was so thin as to be translucent. “That,” he said, “is where all your skin color is. That’s all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.” I mentioned this to Nina Jablonski when we met in her office in State College, Pennsylvania, soon afterward. She gave a nod of vigorous assent. “It is extraordinary how such a small facet of our composition is given so much importance,” she said. “People act as if skin color is a determinant of character when all it is is a reaction to sunlight. Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race—nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples. And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the color of their skin.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

"But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“There would never been an end to all the things I wished I'd asked my father.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Disappointment comes from expectation,”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Free-form jigging, communal shapes in the air; Dancing was easy!...YMCA! YMCA! Arms in the air, mimicking the letters - what a marvelous idea! Who knew that dancing could be so logical? ...From my limited exposure to popular music, people did seem to sing about umbrellas and firstarting and Emily Bronte novels, so, I supposed, why not a gender-and faith-based youth organization?”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“...when you took a moment to see what was around you, noticed all the little things, it made you feel....lighter.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine