Cate Brooks > Cate Brooks's Quotes

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“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

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“I am not the same kind of Mormon girl I was when I was seven, eight, or eighteen years old.  I am not an orthodox Mormon woman like my mother.  I am an unorthodox Mormon woman with a fierce and hungry faith. ”
― Joanna Brooks, The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith

“How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival at a difficult point in Mormon history. ”
― Joanna Brooks, The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith

“Religion is about responsibility to a community and a tradition ...”
― Joanna Brooks, The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.”
― Leif Enger

“I think there should be a rule that everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their lives.”
― R.J. Palacio, Wonder

“Kinder than is necessary. Because it's not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed.”
― R.J. Palacio, Wonder

“We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.”
― Chris Cleave, The Other Hand

“Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
― Amelia Earhart

“A slice of cake never made anyone fat. You don't eat the whole cake. You don't eat a cake every day of your life. You take the cake when it is offered because the cake is delicious. You have a slice of cake and what it reminds you of is someplace that's safe, uncomplicated, without stress. A cake is a party, a birthday, a wedding. A cake is what is served on the happiest days of your life.”
― Jeanne Ray, Eat Cake

“Cakes have gotten a bad rap. People equate virtue with turning down dessert. There is always a person at the table...No, really, I couldn't...Everyone who is pressing a fork into that first tender layer looks at the person who declined the plate, and they all think, That person is better than I am. That person has discipline. But that isn't a person with discipline, that is a person who has completely lost touch with joy.”
― Jeanne Ray, Eat Cake

“Always imagine him close to you when you pray,' she explained. 'If you think of Him as near, then that's where you will find Him. And if you think of Him as far away, then that's where He will be.”
― Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.”
― Lauren Groff

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia