Hannah > Hannah's Quotes

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“I am only alive because I have not yet died.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“It’s futile to ask why. Instead ask yourself, ‘What did I learn from this?’” What have I learned from all of it? There is absolutely no way whatsoever to get through this life without scars.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“When you’re poor, you live in an alternate reality. It’s not that we have problems different from everyone else, but we don’t have the resources to mask them. We’ve been stripped clean of social protocol.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye says that “a person’s love is only as good as the person; a stupid person loves stupidly, a violent man loves violently.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“learned the hard way that when there are underlying issues, money does nothing. In fact, money exacerbates the problem because it takes away the individual’s ability to be held accountable.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money, remember that. You gotta be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what's going on around you. None of that costs a dime.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to lean on is not yet in place, and for a moment you are suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“You don't have to like your work to be good at it.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Like the Bible said,' Gary whispered, 'man brought nothing into this world and he'll carry nothing out. Sometimes we care about stuff too much. We worry when there's nothing to worry about.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading,” I often say to Hugh. “I promise that on the next page you’ll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“I write only to bid you Farewell. The spell is removed; I see you as you are.”
― Jane Austen, Lady Susan

“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments