Erin > Erin's Quotes

“Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the world "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“everyone remembers things which never happened, and it’s common knowledge that people often forget things which did. either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. but i have heard people say we are shaped by our childhood, but which one?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone’s stood on it. I don’t think so. It would take more than a man’s foot to steal the moon.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“It never ceases to amaze me how assured you priests are of your place in the scheme of things. What you refuse to see is how recent is your hold here, that the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived, with your crosses and your prayers. You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow, how fast the stream...”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Land

“We write each other notes, back and forth, back and forth. It’s like texting for people with large collections of stationery.”
― Ann Patchett, Whistler

“People have no understanding of how love works,” Eddie said. “They don’t take gratitude into account. They don’t think about relief.”
― Ann Patchett, Whistler

“Lucas had never regained his footing after the demise of Positivity, a franchise dead in the water by 1985. It would have died long before then had it not been for my mother’s publicist tenacity. Once the series was scrubbed, Lucas spent the rest of his life pacing around the yard, or pacing up and down the halls when the weather was bad. He never could stop grumbling, to my mother or my brothers, about the unfairness of it all. To be unable to find something else to write about was one thing, surely that happened all the time, but his inability to take his own advice was a real mark against him.”
― Ann Patchett, Whistler

“An 'eye.' It did not mean the ability to spot the difference between a topaz and a brown diamond, a real Tiffany and a fake, or even some 'soul' in an object that all could attest to; it was to spot the echo in oneself. I scanned the room and could not sense it, but then again, this was a room filled by someone else's impulses and caprices. To find an echo in oneself, one had to know oneself. That seemed an impossibility. Would I ever become a person who bought a bridal shawl and draped it above a work by some well-known artist? Would I ever become a person who asked for a stone to be chipped off a wall?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco