Bernadette Quigley > Bernadette's Quotes

“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart...”
― Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

“My mother wanted to be Betty Boop. Betty Boop was independent. Betty Boop was sexy. Betty Boop really had her shit together, you know?”
― Chloe Caldwell, Legs Get Led Astray

“Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“I decide to hone my joy. I dance around the kitchen to Judy Garland’s Greatest Hits on the turntable. The sun on my chest, I spin in my socks. Bruised, exhausted, and fluttering back to earth.”
― Chloe Caldwell, Women

“Lesbians can suck my dick! They will ruin your life.' I tell the bartender this after my second tequila shot. He responds by asking if I'd like a glass of water.”
― Chloe Caldwell, Women

“There was nothing he could say that was equal to the curve of her hip.”
― Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? Would would this would be like without dogs?”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased... what would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems