Johnna > Johnna's Quotes

“But maybe you should question the people who taught you this version of God. Because it's not doing you any favors.”
― Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“How do you make love to a physicist? With your whole self, quivering, lush, unafraid.”
― Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“You chide yourself for walking too far ahead, for regressing into 80s song lyrics territory so soon. But then he says, "The supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way recently sparked 75 times brighter over the course of a 2 hour period, and twice as bright as it's ever been in the 20 years astronomers have been monitoring it." By now you're used to him talking Science, but you're not sure where he's going with this. "One theory," he continues "is that the event was caused by a star about 15 times bigger than the sun getting close to the edge of the black hole disturbing some gasses, heating things up, increasing the infrared radiation from the edge. But get this, we observed that star getting close to the black hole about a year before we observed the affects on the black hole." "That just shows how vast the universe is, how enormous the distance," you say. "Exactly! Distances, plural. The distance between the star and the edge of the black hole, and the distance between the black hole and Earth. So, I say all of this to say that sometimes wheels are set in motion long before the spark is manifest. Is that the same thing as fate? I don't know but...I do know that rare brilliant events take time.”
― Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“But you want him to keep talking, to keep listening. Maybe invite him to come up? No, too soon. You don’t think he’s a serial killer. That’s not it. It’s that you don’t want him to think you’re that kind of woman. The kind your mother warned you not to be. So you have not been. You are forty-two.”
― Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“The problem was the companies that sold shitty sanitary pads. Otherwise reasonable adults who believed tampons stole a girl's virginity. Doctors who didn't bother to solve common problems. Birth control that could kill you. Boys who were told that they couldn't control themselves. A society that couldn't handle the fact that roughly half of all humans will menstruate.”
― Kristen Miller, The Change

“Nothing ages a person like poverty and misery,” Harriett said. “Despite what all the ads claim, it’s not skin cream that helps some women keep their glow. The only true youth serum has two ingredients—luck and money.”
― Kirsten Miller, The Change

“When they'd first met in their twenties, he'd seemed like such a fascinating mystery. Unfortunately it hadn't taken long to solve it. By the time they were married, Harriet had realized that everything he did was completely predictable. He valued money, sex, status, and food, in that order. Chase was a very simple creature.”
― Kirsten Miller, The Change

“You seem distracted." "I'm always distracted. It's an unfortunate side effect of being intelligent. You wouldn't know.”
― Talia Hibbert, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute

“May the only justice you face be poetic.”
― Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer

“THE ENEMY…We do refrain from using this term in reference to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as we count so many of their number as alumni.”
― Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer

“It is important to remember Kipling, if only because none of us are ever likely to meet anyone else named Rudyard.”
― Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer

“I was told that where poker faces were concerned, mine was about as inscrutable as an “Eat At Joe’s” sign outside a diner called Joe’s.”
― Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer

“Mr. Iverson, you've all the timing of a prophylactic salesman in a maternity ward.”
― Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer