Rosie > Rosie's Quotes

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I can see it. This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You are alive. And you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song, and that drive with the people who you love most in this world. And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“It is good you have each other, the artist had said, regarding them
seriously as she worked. You never have to explain yourself to sisters.
It was true. Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of
something magic. Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up
of fours. The seasons. The elements. The points on a compass. Four suits in
a pack of cards. Four chambers of a human heart. Bonnie loved being a part
of this mystical number, this perfect symmetry of two sets of two.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“She'd heard once that guilt was for something you'd done- you could feel guilty for a certain behavior or action but still fundamentally know you were a good person- but shame was deeper, shame was for who you were.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“like comparing a fireplace to a forest fire. One was comfort, the other carnage.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I know,” said Bonnie. “I love you too. Without the too.” It was what Nicky used to say to them. No too. Just love.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“A lot was written about romantic love, Avery thought, about the profundity of that embrace. Bu this, too, was deserving of rapture, of song. Before she ever knew a lover's body, she knew her sisters', could see herself in their long feet and light eyes, their sleek limbs and curled ears. And, before life became big and difficult, there were moments with them when it was simply good: an early morning, still dark out, their parents asleep. Her younger sisters arriving one by one at her bedside, hair tangled, exuding their sour and sweet morning musk. She'd lifted the covers for each of them, letting them crowd into her bottom bunk, bodies pressed tight against one another, and they'd fallen asleep again like that, dropping off like puppies curled around a mother's warm belly.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Her sister curled in on herself, as though she could make herself small enough for the hurt not to find her.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“You don't get to do that."
"What? What am I doing?"
"Take our accomplishments as proof of your competence as a parent. They're ours, not yours."
"I am saying they're yours, darling!"
"And you don't get to tell me how my childhood was. I know how it was.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“the best way to honor her sister would be to live life the way Nicky had wanted to, wide-awake and not numbing any part of it.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“They are," agreed Avery, though it hurt her to think of her mother trying to please her in this small way after disappointing her in such big ones for so long. She wished she would just be a good mother or a bad one; this vacillating in between was unbearable.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“But Chiti didn't understand what it was like to have sisters. Against their parents, against the world at large, they were fiercely allied. But among themselves, everything was a competition. There was never enough attention, never enough money, never enough love to go around. So they fought for every scrap.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Just like you wouldn’t have a picnic in a hailstorm, you couldn’t do certain things around an angry dad. No bickering over the remote, no chatting loudly with friends on the phone, no crying over a bad grade, no laughing over a silly joke, no whining to their mom that they were hungry. He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Their mother always fed them, and she never hit them—Bonnie always liked to remind herself of that. But she was overwhelmed by them. She wasn’t the kind of mom who derived satisfaction from cooking or domestic work, but she never asked for help. Each evening, she launched herself at the task of feeding the four of them like an explorer on a particularly grueling leg of a solo mission she regretted starting but had resigned herself to completing. In Bonnie’s opinion, their mother was afraid of Avery, baffled by Bonnie, intermittently charmed by Nicky, and oblivious to Lucky. None of which, obviously, were ideal.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“lifted together on a tide of riotous, unapologetic joy, the feeling that to be a girl with other girls was not some weakness, as they had been told, but a power, the best and luckiest power on earth.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“Love and pain, those were the only disciplinarians she knew in the ring and in life. But love had died when Nicky did, then again when her sisters turned on each other, and again when Pavel looked at her as though she were a stranger. Which left her with pain. That, she could deliver from the heart.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“but she was always happy to delay the night ending.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I know we want to make sense of what she did, and blaming ourselves for not doing more is one way to do that, but none of us could have changed what happened to her.” She thought of what their mother had said. “None of us are that important.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“That was family, she thought sadly, the root of all comfort and chaos.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“There is no American dream without American massacre. Black towns burned, native families displaced, graveyards desecrated, lands stolen, lands ruined: Here is the invention of whiteness, a violence”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

“You know what Daddy would say when he saw Sylvie,” Julia said in a quiet voice. Emeline and Izzy nodded, and Cecelia said, “Hello beautiful.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“The thing was—” He stopped, looking for the right language. “Yes?” the doctor said. “Alice is a lamp. A bright lamp, from the moment she was born. She kind of shines. Looking at her hurt my eyes, and I was afraid to touch her.” “You were afraid of her light?” “No. I was afraid I was going to put her light out. That my darkness would swamp her light.” “So you felt like you had to stay away from her, to keep her safe.” “I have to stay away from her, yes.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“On my first day of training, she told me, "Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world." Treating disease, whether through herbs or magic or drugs, is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural. As are novels, and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“But we can choose a different world. In fact, we will choose a different world. The world will be different a generation from now. The question is whether we will look back in gratitude at the virtuous cycles or in horror at the vicious ones.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous