Aileen > Aileen's Quotes

“There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Men calling a strike, the company calling in the army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we’ve got guns too. Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don't rule it out.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Angus could be a giant ass-pain as far as looking on the bright side. “Demon,” she was always saying, “life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been. That feels like the most unexpected result, but it is also the most well documented.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“we are clearly not the same people at 75 as 15' Roberts told me, 'but there are traces that should be recognizable”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“We learn who we are only by living, and not before.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“First act and then think...We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models." We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested...Be a flirt with your possible selves. Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. "Test and learn...”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Young scientists are rushed to specialize before they know how to think. They end up unable to produce good work themselves and unequipped to spot bad or fraudulent work by their colleagues.”
― David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Holding me in his arms, the way that poems hold clauses.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“If you are surprised that, so soon after a secret agent tried to kill me, I was wondering whether the man with whom I’d had sex liked liked me, remember that being in love is a form of blunt-force trauma. I was concussed with love for him. I bent my head to the cudgel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn’t know what to do.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“He smiled directly into my face for the first time, his dimples notched his cheeks like a pair of speech marks.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Can you swim?” “What?” “If I push you in the river, will it be murder?”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time