Amy E. > Amy's Quotes

“To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass - seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over.”
― Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son

“… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead”
― Caitlin Moran

“But I am, personally, not a gambler. I wouldn’t spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high. I can’t agree with a society that would force me to bet on how much I could love under duress.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“People are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let's all give each other a pass, shall we?”
― David Rakoff, Half Empty

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”
― Susan Sontag

“I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all”
― Susan Sontag

“I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
― Susan Sontag

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. ”
― Susan Sontag

“My ignorance is not charming.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Passion paralyzes good taste.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.”
― Susan Sontag

“It is passivity that dulls feeling.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”
― Susan Sontag

“To the militant, identity is everything.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Love gets bigger after forty," Fenton tells me. "After forty,, love says, 'Come one, come all.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“For a long time I thought the object of the game was identifying the question, love versus freedom, Mandela vs Buthelezi, leave or stay forever ghosted under a thick curtain of oil. Nora said, Maybe a choice isn't the right way to think of it, by which she might have meant, A question loses its power when there is only one answer, as in, yes to Bhutan and Barstow. Yes to chanterelles and portobellos. A temple. Yes. A mosque. Yes. The changeable heart of a child.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“I am walking down the street in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue in the lower sixties, women with shopping bags on all sides. I realize with some horror that for the last fifteen blocks I have been counting how many women have better and how many women have worse figures than I do. Did I say fifteen blocks? I meant fifteen years.”
― Pam Houston, Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul

“I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake.”
― Pam Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness

“Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you’re walking out of the theater you can’t remember anything at all about your own life.”
― Pam Houston, Waltzing the Cat

“If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears. I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds...,why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world.”
― Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

“And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.”
― Ted Hughes, 1930

“God has no religion.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”
― Wendell Berry, Farming: A Hand Book

“Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.”
― Thornton Wilder