Anne > Anne's Quotes

“The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place—irrespective of my subject—where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day. Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a "population" of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience.

Similar considerations arise with regard to recover and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this.

And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Because I haven't yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“In fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England—the first successful modern central bank—was originally founded. In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank—in effect, to circulate or "monetize" the newly created royal debt. This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 percent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest on the same money to the clients who borrowed it) , but it only worked as long as the original loan remained outstanding. To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“In this sense, the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“We would have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the internet, and how much we’re giving it in return. We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us, to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without putting ourselves first.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I'll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“There’s never going to be an end to suffering if ‘he deserves it’ is all the justification people need for inflicting pain.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness. After all, there are many ways to die—peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead—one either is or isn’t. The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.”
― Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

“Every car on every train on every line holds a surprise, a random sampling of humanity brought together in a confined space for a minute or two - a living Rubik's Cube.”
― Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

“I have come to believe that kindness is repaid in unexpected ways and that if you are lonely or bone-tired or blue, you need only come down from your perch and step outside. New York—which is to say, New Yorkers—will take care of you.”
― Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

“That's the way it was. Privilege, which just means 'private law.' Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Y’know,’ he said, ‘it’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“All the women before feel I am their fault," she said. "And if there were women after me, I feel that is my fault.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“And she remembered her costar in Phantoms, Ben Affleck, seeing her visibly distraught immediately after the incident, and hearing where she’d just come from, and replying, “God damn it, I told him to stop doing this.” McGowan believed she’d been “blacklisted” after the incident. “I barely worked in movies ever again.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling