Liz > Liz's Quotes

“Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
― Assata Shakur

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“I just feel pathetic, Jack. I was sitting there like a motherfucking loser, and I just feel pathetic.” Against all evidence of my time working with him, I still expected words of encouragement, words like, “Oh you’re not pathetic. Look at all you’ve done, Janelle! You’re a shining star!” But after a pause, he asked, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could be okay with being pathetic?”
― Janelle Hanchett, I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering

“If you’re sitting in the living room but want to be in the kitchen, the first thing you have to do is realize you’re in the fucking living room.” Oh God, I thought. Good News Jack is speaking in metaphor again. I nodded, following the concept thus far. “Otherwise,” he said, “you’ll never know to get up and walk into the kitchen.” I stared at him with my mouth open. We can’t get someplace new until we’re honest about where we are.”
― Janelle Hanchett, I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering

“Given the fluid, ever-changing nature of thought and therefore of meaning, the best approach is to believe whatever you believe but hold it lightly. We need a certain structure of belief to function and orient in the world. But we don't need a final belief or formula for how something works or what something means. You can play with beliefs and meanings and see what effect they have. If a belief is working—great. And if a belief isn't working—great, because then you can change it.”
― Nirmala, That Is That: Essays About True Nature

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I would look around at the disorder of my life, the chaos and ambiguity—emptiness and servitude alongside exquisite beauty—and I’d think, Somebody else must feel this way too. Because I knew I was grateful. I knew I was so happy to be here I sometimes felt the hand of God himself had spread across my broken shoulders. And yet, maybe I hate motherhood.”
― Janelle Hanchett, I'm Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering

“We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.”
― Kent Nerburn, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace

“Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say while some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.”
― Kent Nerburn

“This was done for obvious reasons, there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“From a moral perspective, the man was guilty; from a legal perspective, the man was likely innocent. That both those things were possible was of course understood.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Interpretation was a matter of great subtlety, a word with many contexts, for example it is often said that an actor interprets a role, or a musician a piece of music.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I looked around again, nothing had changed in the apartment, with the exception of the volume I had purchased at Anton de Rijk’s shop in the Old Town. I had been complicit in my own erasure.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“The Court was run according to the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
― Emma Lazarus

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
― Anna Quindlen

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
― Muhammad Ali

“I'm a fighter. I believe in the eye-for-an-eye business. I'm no cheek turner. I got no respect for a man who won't hit back. You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.”
― Muhammad Ali, The greatest: My own story

“Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.”
― Muhammad Ali