Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“Of the river of time, he worries neither about its spring nor its delta.”
― Yann Martel

“Treat your career like a bad boyfriend. Here's the thing. Your career won't take care of you. It won't call you back or introduce you to its parents.Your career will openly flirt with other people while you are around. It will forget you birthday and wreck your car. Your career will blow you off if you call it too much. It's never going to leave its wife.Your career is fucking other people and everyone knows but you. Your career will never marry you. (...) If your career is a bad boyfriend, it is healthy to remember you can always leave and go sleep with somebody else”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“I want to be around people that do things. I don’t want to be around people anymore that judge or talk about what people do. I want to be around people that dream and support and do things.”
― Amy Poehler

“However, if you do start crying in an argument and someone asks why, you can always say, "I'm just crying because of how wrong you are.”
― amy poehler, Yes Please

“how a person treats their waitress is a great indication of their character.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“That is the motto women should constantly repeat over and over again. Good for her! Not for me.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
― August Wilson

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World

“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

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Words are themselves organisms, ...”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Is it possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.”
― Annie Dillard

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.”
― Annie Dillard

“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“Americans didn't know why they'd become so obsessed with cacti-they just accepted the fact that drought-resistant plants were the new must-haves for office and home design in the mindless way they'd once accepted ferns, but really, what was going on was a socially sanctioned apathy toward the planet's overheating. it was apocalyptic acclimatization by way of indoor plants.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“When you're clear-sighted, you settle into experiences that feed you until they become so familiar and soul-filling that they're a nourishing routine, and as the routine continues, you up and surprise yourself with your righted life.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“When we start a relationship, professional, romantic or otherwise, even when we're born, we establish these threads of energy that connect us to another person...Even by just being here, you're creating one with me. Many times, as people grow or change, or hurt us, the energy that was flowing gets confused and trapped. Especially in the case of loss, where the energy doesn't have anywhere tangible to move forward. We can become very sick by storing up outdated energy. Cord cutting isn't always about severing completely from someone, but it is about separating ourselves off from the iteration of the relationship that no longer enriches our life. It's a ceremony, really. And a difficult one. But it's tremendously important.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“[R]esitance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking. And anti-Trumpism is not a politics. My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize -- or even recognize -- the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump.

The only adversary left is ourselves. And we have mastered the art of self-sabotage. At a time when we liberals need to speak in a way that convinces people from very different walks of life, in every part of the country, that they share a common destiny and need to stand together, our rhetoric encourages self-righteous narcissism. At a moment when political consciousness and strategizing need to be developed, we are expending our energies on symbolic drama over identity. At a time when it is crucial to direct our efforts into seizing institutional power by winning elections, we dissipate them in expressive movements indifferent to the effects they may have on the voting public. In an age when we need to educate young people to think of themselves as citizens with duties toward each other, we encourage them instead to descend into the rabbit hole of the self. The frustrating truth is that we have no political vision to offer the nation, and we are thinking and speaking and acting in ways guaranteed to prevent one from emerging.”
― Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“Some people have lives; some people have music.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“But this home over here: it needed paint but had flowers neatly planted all the way around it. That one over there had a tire swing out front, tied to a fat magnolia tree. Behind another, a lush vegetable garden. You got to fight not to give into despair, he told himself. You got to see the good that's mixed in with the bad.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“That was the point of Mardi Gras, was it not? To serve and honor all the people, to bring into hard lives a touch of royalty and grandeur....To put on a spectacle such as this, free of charge, was an honor. New Orleans was sick and wounded, but no other city in the world had a celebration quite like this. It was beautiful precisely because it was so frivolous.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans