Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled. Listen to no one except the two smartest and kindest adults you know, and that doesn't always mean your parents. If you do that, you will be fine.”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

“If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing—the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.”
― Veronica Roth, Allegiant

“Penance is in my bones. So's a desire to confess, even when it isn't technically necessary. I think it stems from seeds of superstition left over from a childhood belief in an omniscient creator. I imagine this creator, this observer, as a sort of annoying sibling in the sky, forever calling me on my bullshit. When I lie or cheat, I actually feel like that annoying sibling in the sky calls down, "Bullshit, Suzie, BULLSHIT!" and that anyone nearby, if they're at all sensitive to the catcalls of the gods, can hear him. And so I behave accordingly, and try to make amends for what I have done.”
― Suzanne Morrison, Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Ma'am is yet another horrible-sounding word in the lexicon of words that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/mental state/hair. Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. These are all terrible words, and yet they are our assigned descriptors. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, 'What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?',' I most certainly wouldn't have said, 'Vagina.' No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. Even off the very top of my head I feel like I could have come up with something better, like for instance the word papoose, which actually as I'm typing it feels like an incredibly brilliant word for vagina.”
― Jessi Klein, You'll Grow Out of It

“Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotten more.'
'Seventeen,' Gus corrected.
'I'm assuming you've got some time, you interupting bastard.
'I'm telling you,' Isaac continued, 'Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness.
'But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.'
I was kind of crying by then.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I sometimes think of people’s personalities as the negative space around their insecurities. Afraid of intimacy? Cultivate aloofness. Feel invisible? Laugh loud and often. Drink too much? Play the gregarious basket case. Hate your body? Slash and burn others so you can climb up the pile. We construct elaborate palaces to hide our vulnerabilities, often growing into caricatures of what we fear. The goal is to move through the world without anyone knowing quite where to dig a thumb. It’s a survival instinct. When people know how to hurt you, they know how to control you. But”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.

What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live.

If we keep passing down the legacy of martyrdom to our daughters, with whom does it end? Which woman ever gets to live? And when does the death sentence begin? At the wedding altar? In the delivery room? Whose delivery room—our children’s or our own? When we call martyrdom love we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, "I'm on the pill because I like dick.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“That's part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence. But I do - God, I do really want to know that happens to everyone else.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“And that for every negative event or coincidence that has happened since, imagining that you triggered them, that you made them happen makes you feel like you possess a degree of control that you don't have.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer

“Noah acted like he felt nothing because he felt everything. He seemed not to care because he cared too much.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer

“Anyway, there's some fuckery afoot, clearly, but I don't think you're possessed.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer

“When you worry, you're praying for what you don't want.”
― Suzanne Morrison

“If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,” she said, “I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.” The mantra in her chambers is “Get it right and keep it tight.” She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. “If you can say it in plain English, you should,” RBG says. Going through “innumerable drafts,” the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. “I think that law should be a literary profession,” RBG says, “and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“6/17/10 My dearest Ruth—You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some 56 years ago. What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!! I will be in JH Medical Center until Friday, June 25, I believe, and between then and now I shall think hard on my remaining health and life, and whether on balance the time has come for me to tough it out or to take leave of life because the loss of quality now simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.
Marty
-- Handwritten letter from Marty to Ruth”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“When the jabot with scalloped glass beads glitters flat against the top of RBG's black robe, it's bad news for liberals. That's her dissent collar.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“His pictures of this region summarize the soulful emptiness of a country where, as Gertrude Stein observed, 'there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, 'This is your Fourth of July, not mine'.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“The scene of Washington cussing out Charles Lee was for some reason not included in the series of bronze illustrations of the Battle of Monmouth on the monument at the county courthouse. Even though it was the most New Jersey–like behavior in the battle, if not the entire war.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Lafayette took umbrage - just gobs and gobs of umbrage - at the patriots' vilification of his countrymen for leaving Newport.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“We the survivors are not the true witnesses. The true witnesses, those in possession of the unspeakable truth are the drowned, the dead, the disappeared.”
― Primo Levi