Danny Baxter > Danny's Quotes

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The reality is that kids are complicated, far too complicated and distinct to be sorted into only one of two bins.”
― Christia Spears Brown, Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes

“It isn't about denying that children are girls or boys. It is about children not being defined by gender.”
― Christia Spears Brown, Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“For you a thousand times over...”
― Khalid Hosseini

“And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir Jan, when guilt leads to good.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“All these attempts to impose order and fairness on a naturally random and unfair universe endorse the borderline’s futile struggle to choose only black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. But the world is neither intrinsically fair nor exact; it is composed of subtleties that require less simplistic approaches. A healthy civilization can accept the uncomfortable ambiguities. Attempts to eradicate or ignore uncertainty tend only to encourage a borderline society.”
― Jerold J. Kreisman, I Hate You--Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality

“Unwilling to play the hand that is dealt [to] him, the borderline keeps folding every time, losing his ante, waiting to be dealt four aces. If he cannot be assured of winning, he won't play out the hand. Improvement comes when he learns to accept the hand for what it is, and recognize that, skillfully played, he can still win.”
― Jerold J. Kreisman, I Hate You—Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“And I knew that in spite of all the roses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“We humans are not getting more evil or sinful but are simply getting more competent and efficient at whatever we want to do--including sin as willed violence. And so, we have become, as Genesis 4 warned us inaugurally, steadily or even exponentially better and better at violence. And now, at last, that capacity threatens not just the family or the tribe, but the world and the Earth.”
― John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation

“The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like "Virginia Woolf", it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“The problem is we have a standard of what evil is, Hitler, the Holocaust—THE standard of absolute evil. . . . But then everyone gets frantic as soon as you try to use the standard, nothing compares, nothing resembles—and the standard becomes unusable and nothing qualifies as Evil with a capital E. . . . I mean like a certain ex-actor-turned-president who shall go nameless sat idly and I do mean idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldn't even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help . . . I mean do you have to pile up some magic number of bodies before you hit the jackpot and rare a comparison with you-know-who?”
― Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day

“No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“When your uncle first married me, I worried because I thought those women outside would come and displace me from my home. I now know that nothing he does will make my life change. My life will only change if I want it to change.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Mi abuela tenía una teoría muy interesante, decía que si bien todos nacemos con una caja de cerillos en nuestro interior, no los podemos encender solo, necesitamos, como en le experimento, oxígeno y la ayuda de una vela. Sólo que en este caso el oxígeno tiene que provenir, por ejemplo, del aliento de la persona amada; la vela puede ser cualquier tipo do alimento, música, caricia, palabra o sonido que haga disparar el detonador y así encender uno de los cerillos. Por un momento nos sentiremos deslumbrados por una intensa emoción. Se producirá en nuestro interior un agradable calor que irá desapareciendo poco a poco conforme pase el tiempo, hasta que venga una nueva explosión a reavivarlo. Cada persona tiene que descubrir cuáles son sus detonadores para poder vivir, pues la combustión que se produce al encenderse uno de ellos es lo que nutre de energía al alma. Si uno no descubre a tiempo cuáles son sus propios detonadores, la caja de cerillos se humedece y ya nunca podremos encender un solo fósforo.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don't choose what's in the picture, but you decide on the frame.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M.C. Escher.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name