Susan > Susan's Quotes

“I ran out of strong.”
― Ron Hall, Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

“A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep into her bones. ”
― Kristin Hannah, Summer Island

“If you want to understand any woman, you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. ”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Because there is nothing I would rather do than rummage through bookshops, I went at once to Hastings & Sons Bookshop upon receiving your letter. I have gone to them for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn't known I wanted.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Do you know what they call people who hoard books? Smart.”
― Lisa Scottoline, My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

“Books can be possessive, can't they? You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what's inside will change your life, but sometimes you don't even have to read it. Sometimes it's a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven't even had their spines cracked. 'Why do you buy books you don't even read?' our daughter asks us. That's like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

“Once you got started, all you had to do was keep placing one foot in front of the other, no matter how happy or sad you were. I'd taken that first step because I'd wanted to look better. I'd wanted my clothes to fit. But it hadn't taken me long to figure out that the biggest benefit was less about vanity than it was about sanity. Walking always helped.”
― Claire Cook, The Wildwater Walking Club

“I found out everybody’s different – the same kind of different as me. We’re all just regular folks walkin down the road God done set in front of us. The truth about it is, whether we is rich or poor or something in between, this earth ain’t no final restin place. So in a way, we is all homeless – just workin our way toward home”
― Denver Moore, Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“The Word says God don't give us credit for lovin the folks we want to love anyway. No, He gives us credit for loving the unlovable.”
― Denver Moore, Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

“But ain't it always the way, Birdie, that the easiest faults to find in other people are the ones you got yourself?”
― Lisa Wingate, A Month of Summer

“Sometimes we have to forgive the people we love, even if we're mad as hell. That's just how it is.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Things We Do for Love

“I knew Denver was sincere when he told me that he would not want to trade places with me for even one day. His convictions became clear to me when I laid my key ring on the table between us at one of our earlier meetings for coffee.
Denver smiled a bit and sidled up to a cautious question. 'I know it ain't none of my business, but does you own somethin' that each one of those keys fits?'
I glanced at the keys; there were about ten of them. 'I suppose,' I replied, not really ever having thought about it.
'Are you sure you own them, or does they own you?'
That wisdom stuck to my brain like duct tape. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced we'd enjoy life a whole lot more if we owned a whole lot less.”
― Ron Hall, Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

“Friday is a purple-velvet-sofa day for some poor woman who's finally reclaimed her life. A purple velvet sofa is a gal's symbol of freedom.”
― Beth Hoffman, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

“The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life-without flinching or whining-the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“Nobody ever told me that motherhood was temporary. You think you have years and years with them, but the truth is, you don't.”
― Adriana Trigiani, All the Stars in the Heavens

“I’m telling you, Dena, when you live long enough to see your children begin to look at you with different eyes, and you can look at them not as your children, but as people, it’s worth getting older with all the creaks and wrinkles.”
― Fannie Flagg, The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion

“She was afraid to love me," Nancy said. "I never realized it. By keeping her distance, she thought she could protect me. If she didn't love me, maybe I would escape notice. I would survive.”
― Emilie Richards, Wedding Ring

“They would always be a family, but if she'd learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn't control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.”
― Kristin Hannah, Winter Garden

“What we cannot change, we must endure without bitterness.
Sometimes we must try to view the actions of those around us with forgiveness. We must realize that they are going on the only road they can see. Sometimes we cannot raise our chins and see eye to eye, so we must bow our heads and have faith in one another.”
― Lisa Wingate, Tending Roses

“Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder-had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isablle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling. More terrible than having Avery Clark forget to come to her house. Knowing that her child had grown up frightened. Except it was cockeyed, all backwards, because, thought Isabelle, glancing back at her daughter, I've been frightened of you.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle

“Most folks here got rules 'bout trespassing. Warning shot's fired right close to the head. Get they's attention. Next shot gets a lot more personal. Now I'm too old to waste time firing a warning shot.....”
― David Baldacci, Wish You Well

“.....there's a stinking huge difference between influence and the authority you get with a title. Any dolt can stumble into a title.....Lots of people with big-sounding titles have people under them listening only because they have to.”
― John S. Lynch, Bo's Café

“Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.”
― Rebecca Wells, The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

“People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“I have come to believe that we do not walk alone in this life. There are others, fellow sojourners, whose journeys are interwoven with ours in seemingly random patterns, yet, in the end, have been carefully placed to reveal a remarkable tapestry. I believe God is the weaver at that loom.”
― Richard Paul Evans

“INDIAN wisdom says our lives are rivers. We are born somewhere small and quiet and we move toward a place we cannot see, but only imagine. Along our journey, people and events flow into us, and we are created of everywhere and everyone we have passed. Each event, each person, changes us in some way. Even in times of drought we are still moving and growing, but it is during seasons of rain that we expand the most—when water flows from all directions, sweeping at terrifying speed, chasing against rocks, spilling over boundaries. These are painful times, but they enable us to carry burdens we could never have thought possible.”
― Lisa Wingate, Tending Roses

“We all have things we don’t talk about, Ernest thought. Even though, more often than not, those are the things that make us who we are.”
― Jamie Ford, Love and Other Consolation Prizes