Sandy > Sandy's Quotes

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.”
― Bryan Stevenson

“Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.”
― Richard Powers

“Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.”
― Esther Freud

“What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul”
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“To gaze into another persons face is to do two things: to recognise their humanity and to assert your own.”
― Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
― Nicholas Klein

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

“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“‎'He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.”
― Charles Finch, A Stranger in Mayfair

“Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.”
― Temple Grandin

“To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.”
― Victor Hugo

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet. A mere teaspoonful contains many miles of fungal filaments. All these work the soil, transform it, and make it so valuable for the trees.”
― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World

“As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage.”
― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory