Andrea Vanmiddendorp > Andrea's Quotes

“Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.”
― Ransom Riggs, Hollow City

“I knew there was something peculiar about you," she said. "And I mean that as the highest compliment.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Destiny is for people in books about magical swords.”
― Ransom Riggs, Hollow City

“Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.”
― Erma Bombeck

“Written on her tombstone: "I told you I was sick.”
― Erma Bombeck

“As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.”
― Erma Bombeck

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”
― Erma Bombeck

“There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.”
― Erma Bombeck

“Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.”
― Erma Bombeck

“One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.”
― Erma Bombeck

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“Look on the effect of your religions, those movements that have swept up millions with their fantastical
claims. Look at what they have done to human history. Look at the wars fought on account of them; look at
the persecutions, the massacres. Look at the pure enslavement of reason; look at the price of faith and zeal.”
― Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned

“was trembling”
― Fred Gipson, Old Yeller

“It was a strange experience to be looking out the window of an eighteenth-century Chinese house at a seventeenth-century colonial graveyard full of people in twenty-first-century Halloween costumes. Salem, guys.”
― J.W. Ocker, A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts

“That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.”
― Terry Pratchett, Nation

“They say it's good to let your grudges go, but I don't know, I'm quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Helicopter parents. Before I started at Pirriwee Public, I thought it was an exaggeration, this thing about parents being overly involved with their kids. I mean, my mum and dad loved me, they were, like, interested in me when I was growing up in the nineties, but they weren't, like, obsessed with me.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“Samantha: Parents do tend to judge each other. I don’t know why. Maybe because none of us really know what we’re doing? And I guess that can sometimes lead to conflict. Just not normally on this sort of scale.”
― Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

“[W]omen were those most likely to be victimized because they were the most 'disempowered' by these changes, especially older women, who often rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion and who consituted the bulk of the accused. In other words, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europe at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social poer, leaving them with no resort but dependence on the charity of the better-off at a time when communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized begging and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women