Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“Reality is like a fruitcake; pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.”
― A. Lee Martinez, Gil's All Fright Diner

“Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

“Being a good person is more than just not being a bad person.”
― A. Lee Martinez, Monster

“When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another. ”
― Alan Alda

“Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. The teenybopper sister snaps bug stretchy pink bubbles over her tongue and checks her lipgloss in the rearview mirror, . . . Teeny plays the radio too loud and bites her nails, wondering if the glitter polish will poison her.”
― Francesca Lia Block, I Was a Teenage Fairy

“Love simply is.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

“After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

“We are not worshipping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with creation.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

“Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Boys and girls hid in the library stacks or behind the gym and flew at each other with no promise of love or even kindness, tasting one another in clumsly attempts to steal pleasure before they could be hurt or hated.”
― Laura Whitcomb, A Certain Slant of Light

“Humans... You want a nice warm hug from a cold, indifferent universe.”
― A. Lee Martinez, Chasing the Moon

“Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else.”
― A. Lee Martinez, Gil's All Fright Diner

“Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong.”
― Tamora Pierce, Emperor Mage

“When in doubt, shoot the wizard.”
― Tamora Pierce

“I am not wise, but I can always learn.”
― Tamora Pierce, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

“Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.”
― Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night

“Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.”
― Sarah Vowell

“I'm always disappointed when I see the word "Puritan" tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War