Ami > Ami's Quotes

“Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn't have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance 'lead anywhere'? Passion isn't a path through the woods. Passion is the woods.”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.'
'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“I wished my mother was here tonight, which is stupid, because it’s an impossible wish.” He shrugs and turns to me, drowning the smile that cracks me every time.
“It’s not stupid to want to see her again.”
“It wasn’t so much that I wanted to see her again,” he says, looking at me with the depth of more than seventeen years in his eyes. “I wanted her to see you.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“I know at that moment what he's given me and it isn't a chair. It's an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn't given me a place to sit. He's given me a place to belong.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“What did you call her?" she asks but I don't think it's her real question.
"Sunshine," I say, and she smiles like she believes it's perfect and she may be the only person other than me who would think so.
"What is she to you?" she whispers. The real question and I know the answer even if I don't know how to say it.
Drew's muffled voice rises up from the floor before I can respond.
"Family," he says.
And he's right.”
― Katja Millay

“When you look at her what do you feel?... Joy, fear, frustration, longing, friendship, anger, need, despair, love, lust?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"All of it.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“I don't know how to say it - after all this time, I'm not even sure that I can - but I have to break her last rule, because if she knows nothing else, I need her to know this one thing.
'I love you, Sunshine,' I tell her, before I lose my nerve. 'And I don't give a shit whether you want me to or not.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“From my observation, the older you get, the more you like the word cozy.
That's why most of the elderly wear pants with elastic waistbands. If they wear pants at all. This may explain why grandparents are in love with buying grand kids pajamas and bathrobes.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“She said that I was highly gifted.

Are people lowly gifted?

Or medium gifted?

Or just gifted? It's possible that all labels are curses. Unless they're on cleaning products.

In my opinion, it's not really a great idea to see people as just one thing.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“I'm not brave; it's just that all other choices have been thrown out the window.”
― Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s

“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“As with most of life's problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially ‘colonised’ it. So technically, I colonised Mars.
In your face, Neil Armstrong!”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Matilda said, "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable...”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“I'll be certain to feel superior as they hurl insults and rocks in my direction."
"I thought southern people were supposed to be warm and welcoming."
"Only to your face.”
― Andrea Laurence, Facing the Music

“This, I thought, was why the bees and birds landed on him--he clearly had a whole world inside him with rivers of honey and a heart made from flowers. Bernard was just like a closed bud, an acorn with a tree inside, a song yet to be heard.”
― Michelle Cuevas, Confessions of an Imaginary Friend

“To tell the truth, I was beginning to think you would be in awe of anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. If you could watch them making up little songs, and doing funny faces in the mirror; if you saw them high-fiving a leaf on a tree, or stopping to watch a green inchworm hanging midair from an invisible thread, or just being really different and lonely and crying sometimes at night. Seeing them, the real them, you couldn't help but think that anyone and everyone is amazing.”
― Michelle Cuevas, Confessions of an Imaginary Friend

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“If you want to make someone cry, " Bruno said slowly, "you give them an onion to chop. But if you want them to feel sad, you cook them the dish their mother used to cook for them when they were small...”
― Anthony Capella, The Food of Love

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été

“Women matter. Women are half of us. When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time—that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters where women’s safety and humanity are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“He taught me that there is no shame in breaking something, only in not being able to fix it.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“We love each other because we can't help it. We don't work at it and we don't sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won't work, moving heaven and earth often won't make it work -- and similarly, there are some things that you just can't screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don't want to. I really don't want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him...”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl