Purlewe > Purlewe's Quotes

“It's like getting the best Christmas gift ever, but Santa decided to kick the crap out of you before you unwrapped it.”
― Adrienne Martini, Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood

“100 years ago, buying something you could make was considered wasteful; now making something you could buy is considered wasteful. I am not convinced this is a step in the right direction.”
― Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, All Wound Up: The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin

“The world is not beautiful. Therefore it is.”
― Keiichi Sigsawa, Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World

“I do wish you wouldn't argue with me when I'm knitting.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
― Alice Walker

“Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.”
― Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

“There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.”
― Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.”
― Dorothy Allison

“You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head...”
― Laurie R. King

“All knitterly creation stems from one simple element: yarn. It is the baker’s flour, the jeweler’s gold, the gardener’s soil. Yarn is creation, consolation, and chaos all spun together into one perfect ball.”
― Clara Parkes

“Brave young women complete heroic acts everyday, with no one bearing witness. This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story the made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet feats of courage. And to introduce them to the young women like Kamila Sidiqi who will go on. No matter what.”
― Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe

“To be black in America is a wild and endless assault on the senses. You can spend every day fighting off your spiritual and intellectual extinction.”
― Carvell Wallace

“In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies were theirs.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise: Sneak Peek

“Curiosity is the curse of the Clever. Or perhaps cleverness is the curse of the Curious. In any case, I am never lacking for either, I’m afraid, which does keep me rather busy.”
― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers . . . The borders are open, folks! Come on in.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope.”
― Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.”
― Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“Intersectionality slows things down. The simple truth is, when you are only considering the needs of a select few, it’s a lot easier to make what looks like progress than when you have to consider the needs of a diverse group of people. This is where you often hear people say things like, “Well, let’s just work on what the majority needs first and we’ll get to the rest later.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Tying racism to its systemic causes and effects will help others see the important difference between systemic racism, and anti-white bigotry.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Intersectionality decentralizes people who are used to being the primary focus of the movements they are a part of.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race