Daniel Chaikin > Daniel's Quotes

“Hey, Arnold," he said. I looked up 'in love with a white girl' on Google and found and article about that white girl named Cynthia who disappeared in Mexico last summer. You remember how her face was all over the papers and everybody said it was such a sad thing?"
"I kinda remember," I said.
"Well this article said that over two hundred Mexican girls have disappeared in the last three years in that same part of the country. And nobody says much about that. And that's racist. The guy who wrote the article says people care more about beautiful white girls than they do about everybody else on the planet. White girls are privileged. They're damsels in distress."
So what does that mean?" I asked.
"I think it means you're just a racist asshole like everybody else.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, It Seems to Me: Selected Letters

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“I don't get high, but sometimes I wish I did. That way, when I messed up in life I would have an excuse. But right now there's no rehab for stupidity. ”
― Chris Rock

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“I wish, when I was first born, the first thing I said was "Quote" so the last thing I said before I died would be "Unquote.”
― Steven Wright

“One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it's gone now.”
― Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“I have a stand-up routine I do about masturbation and the unwanted thoughts that go through women's heads when they put their hands under their sheets. I need a story to think about. I need a fantasy that makes sense. I can't just finger myself and picture Johnny Depp's face. It needs a sense of realism, like how did I meet Johnny Depp? He lives in France. I don't have a work visa. Besides, he has children and I've made it quite clear that I don't want to be a mom and I don't want to be stepmom either.”
― Jen Kirkman, I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids

“The Indians are the Italians of Asia", Didier pronounced with a sage and mischievous grin. "It can be said, certainly, with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe, but you do understand me, I think. There is so much Italian in the Indians, and so much Indians in the Italians. They are both people of the Madonna - they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is music inside the body, and music is food inside the heart. The Language of India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. They are nations where love - amore, pyaar - makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They’ll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“A landmark 2007 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) found girls being sexualized--or treated as "objects of sexual desire... as things rather than as people with legitimate sexual feelings of their own"--in virtually every form of media, including movies, television, music videos and lyrics, video games and the Internet, advertising, cartoons, clothing, and toys. Even Dora the Explorer, once a cute, square-bodied child, got a makeover to make her look more svelte and "hot.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“The APA surveyed multiple studies which found links between the sexualization of girls and a wide range of mental health issues, including low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, cutting, even cognitive-dysfunction. Apparently, thinking about being hot makes it hard to think: "Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities," said the APA report.”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.” Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Antonio's fixation was always the same: Sarratore's son {Nino}. He was afraid that I would talk to him, even that I would see him {at school}. Naturally, to prevent him from suffering, I concealed the fact that I ran into Nino entering school, coming out, in the corridors. Nothing particularly happened, at most we exchanged a nod of greeting and went on our way: I could have talked to my boyfriend about it without any problems if he had been a reasonable person. But Antonio was not reasonable and in truth I wasn't either. Although Nino gave me no encouragement, a mere glimpse of him left me distracted during class. His presence a few classrooms away—real, alive, better educated than the professors, and courageous, and disobedient—drained meaning from the teachers' lectures, the pages of books, the plans for marriage, the gas pump on the Stradonr.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele's guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes - especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general, but for a man - preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn't, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn't. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain

“Moments of mystery are rare enough, in all conscience; and when they do arrive all the world misses them by trying to understand them. Which is manifestly ungrateful and stupid.”
― Zona Gale, Romance Island

“The American Revolution and its aftermath coincided with two great transformations in the late eighteenth century. In the political sphere, there had been a repudiation of royal rule, fired by a new respect for individual freedom, majority rule, and limited government. If Hamilton made distinguished contributions in this sphere, so did Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. In contrast, when it came to the parallel economic upheavals of the period—the industrial revolution, the expansion of global trade, the growth of banks and stock exchanges—Hamilton was an American prophet without peer. No other founding father straddled both of these revolutions—only Franklin even came close—and therein lay Hamilton’s novelty and greatness. He was the clear-eyed apostle of America's economic future, setting forth a vision that many found enthralling, others unsettling, but that would ultimately prevail. He stood squarely on the modern side of a historical divide that seemed to separate him from other founders. Small wonder he aroused such fear and confusion.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.”
― Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke. His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate. He never noticed my preparation to leave him.

So I slipped away as quietly as possible and left him with his smoke pictures.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

“We cry ’cause we slave. In night time we cry, we say we born and raised to be free people and now we slave. We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis. It strange to us. Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say. Some makee de fun at us.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

“Yes! I'm me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don't understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That's the kind of person I am!”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.”
― Anthony Trollope