Lee Ellen > Lee Ellen's Quotes

“Mystery is never more than a mirage that vanishes as we draw near to look at it.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“[O]ur relationship with nature has become warped. You see, nature has acquired a purpose where we are concerned. Its task is to amuse us. It no longer exists for its own sake.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“Domestic interior design is a fraught affair. It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so undiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygienic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria, and pleasant.”
― Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

“...I am not a bed-and breakfast person. I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They’re pretty. They’re personal. They’re “quaint,” a polite way of saying “no TV.” They are “romantic,” i.e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They’re “cozy,” meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.”
― Sarah Vowell Assassination Vacation

“But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was the border state, a schizophrenic no-man’s-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“...it’s worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature’s loss as the republic’s gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“To me, every plaque, no matter what words are inscribed on it, says the same magic informative thing: Something happened! The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the northeast’s power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, “Cheer up, everybody, we’re part of history!” Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lilac-scented candles about a political murder committed around the time of the Spanish-American War, I snapped at him. “Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“…I still have some respect. Respect for those who read. For those who snatch important time from their lives so as to construct a new one. Nothing is more powerful than reading; no one is a greater liar than he who holds that reading a book is a passive gesture…Reading is a dangerous act, because it gives shape and dimension to words, it incarnates and disperses them in all directions. It turns everything upside down and makes change and tickets and lint fall out of the pockets of the world…to know is the first step toward change. My respect goes to those people who don’t throw these stories away, who don’t neglect them, who make them their own. Those who feel the words on their skin, who carve them in their flesh, who build a new vocabulary – they are altering the direction of the world, because they have understood how to be in it.”
― Roberto Saviano, Zerozerozero: Look at Cocaine and All You See Is Powder. Look Through Cocaine and You See the World

“In the United States, it is our weakness to confuse the numerical strength of an organization and the publicity attached to leaders with the germinating forces that sow the seeds of social upheaval in our community.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Of course we got drunk!" Semyon said. "It's okay to get drunk, Anton. If you need to real bad. Only you have to get drunk on vodka. Cognac and wine—that's all for the heart."

"So what's vodka for?"

"For the soul. If it's hurting real bad”
― Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch

“Semyon was a natural scientist; he liked to say he trafficked in facts, not niceties. Manners were for intellectual weaklings in the humanities.”
― Alex Halberstadt, Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning

“...when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.”
― Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

“If you spend eight hours of your day at work, and eight hours at home, there is no reason why your workplace should be any less of a community than your home.”
― Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

“...towns and buildings will not be able to become alive, unless they are made by all the people in society...”
― Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

“An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. Most humans didn’t love one another nohow, and this mislove was so strong that even common blood couldn’t overcome it all the time. She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the market-place to sell. Been set for still-bait. When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“If you love books enough, books will love you back.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids