Liz > Liz's Quotes

“Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.”
― Dave Ramsey, The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness

“Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“We are the makers of history, not its victims.”
― John Heilemann, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

“America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.”
― Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.”
― Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“Two hundred women, no phones, no washing machines, no hair dryers--it was like Lord of the Flies on estrogen.”
― Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black

“Every man is a moon and has a [dark] side which he turns toward nobody; you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.
-Mark Twain
From introduction to The Amateur.”
― Edward Klein, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House

“I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

“Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

“Alas...I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it's never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“Even strength must bow to wisdom sometimes.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Hades raised an eyebrow. When he sat forward in his throne, shadowy faces appeared in the folds of his black robes, faces of torment,as if the garment was stitched of trapped souls from the Fields of Punishment, trying to get out. The ADHD part of me wondered, off-task, whether the rest of his clothes were made the same way. What horrible things would you have to do in your life to get woven into Hades' underwear?”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“I gave her my deluxe I'll-Kill-You-Later stare.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Last year, it cost the British taxpayers $57.8 million to maintain its royal family,” wrote Robert Keith Gray in Presidential Perks Gone Royal. “During that same year, it cost American taxpayers some $1.4 billion to house and serve the Obamas in the White House, along with their families, friends and visiting campaign contributors.”
― Edward Klein, Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas

“Tarkin smiled. “Someone once said that politics is little more than the systematic organization of hostilities.”
― James Luceno, Tarkin

“For all that sentients have achieved with weapons and machines, life remains an ongoing battle for survival, with the strong or the smart at the top of the heap, and the rest kept in check by firepower and laws.”
― James Luceno, Tarkin

“Those who think only in straight lines cannot see around a curve.”
― Romina Russell, Zodiac

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven