Suzanne LaPierre > Suzanne's Quotes

“Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”
― Alan Turing

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
― Theodore Parker

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite

“The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.”
― B.B. King

“There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
― A.A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh

“I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us further away.”
― Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:   Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“When reentering society and risking rejection, the library is a good place to start. They have low expectations. I love the library. Also church. Both have to take you in.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed

“If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs,
"The bark on the tree was as soft as the skies."
While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,
Crying to the moo-oo-oon,
"If only, If only.”
― Louis Sachar, Holes

“As you discover what strength you can draw from your community in this world from which it stands apart, look outward as well as inward. Build bridges instead of walls.”
― Sonia Sotormayor

“Books have played a role in almost every one of the world's great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.”
― Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

“We're all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”
― John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“...the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels, Indian novels. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot