Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“Maybe all you can do is give yourself permission to embrace the rest of your life. To play, to love, to risk. To take the beauty that someone brought into your life and share it.”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Good Dirt

“The Mind Cannot Be Chained”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Good Dirt

“There will always be men willing to steal the freedom of others if they think it will bring them an advantage,” Frenchie said.”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Good Dirt

“For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”
― Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life

“I understand it so simply now, it is a love that lives in the body but unlike the body it never dissolves. It lasts forever.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“But the dandelion—this single flower that has given nourishment to countless other living creatures—is considered a weed.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else. Mine are the blood of me, and the oxygen in that blood, the airflow and the neurons firing and the stretch and release of muscles in limbs, they are the foundations that make up my skeleton, all the collagen and calcium upon which I stand and fall, and the pulse and the flow and the beat. But I think maybe this is too much for them to be. The breath of a man. The life of him. I think it is too heavy a thing for children to carry.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“What I miss is having someone to look at in moments like these, someone who understands not just the talent or cleverness of our children but the wisdom, the immensity of feeling they hold within. Instead I marvel at them alone.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I remember a morning, one of many that all bleed together in my mind. A morning I rose, shattered by grief and weariness, stumbling into our living room in the city. I remember wondering why I could hear no crying, no morning calls for a bottle, and then seeing my son on his back in a shaft of sunlight, with the small lean bodies of my older children laid around him, I remember their fingers tickling his belly and his smile, his first smile. They looked up at me with such awe, such delight. A smile, Dad! He's smiling! And I thought, this is why we survive.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”

He isn’t listening to me, but I don’t expect him to. He never did.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“I thought he understood me. I thought he accepted the vulnerability I battled to show him, I thought we were closer for it, but instead of comprehending the complexity of how I felt—and the difficulty of contradictory feelings—he judged me, misunderstood me, and is now using it against me.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

“Look,” Vanessa said, pointing up toward the western edge of the sky. “Hercules.” Joan did not speak. “The whole sky makes sense to me now,” Vanessa said. “Because of you.” And Joan thought, Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“You make my life worth something. And I can promise you with my entire body that you will never be alone. Every day, you can wake up and go to bed knowing there is someone whose heart is bursting, barely able to contain how much they love you. I know you’re my niece, Frances. But you have always, too, been mine.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Listen to me,” Joan said. “I was circling two hundred miles above the Earth, and all I wanted was to get home and see you. Do you understand that? Do you understand that I don’t care how big or small this world is, that you are the center of mine? Do you understand that, to someone, you are everything that matters on this entire planet?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don't understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“I will never be Jimmy,” Joan said. “Or Marty. Or Teddy. I don’t want to tell jokes at other people’s expense, and pretend I’m never afraid, and refuse to ask for help. I don’t want to hold in how I feel, or hide it if I’ve been hurt, or try to prove to anyone that I don’t cry. Because I do cry sometimes.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Being human was such a lonely endeavor.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“For Frank, Love Beth If the man could hear me, I would tell him this: It was instant, Dad It was instant. No pain The sorrow was all your own. Enough now. I would tell him that. Lives should be measured in intensity. Remember mine For its glory-stretch of furious light and wondrous beauty. The world we love-lived Is earth Is dust Is me, Dad.”
― Clare Leslie Hall, Broken Country

“Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Florida’s soil is soaked with so much blood, it’s a wonder the droplets don’t seep between your toes with every step, Mama used to say.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“don’t b’lieve in ‘evil’ in most ways,” Miz Lottie said. “I believe in the devil, all right, but man don’t need no help from Satan to do what folks call ‘evil.’ Man do evil ev’ry day and call it doin’ their job. Slave drivers was ‘doin’ their job,’ beatin’ the skin off folks. Slave catchers settin’ dogs to rip out eyes and limbs. Don’t nobody know to this day how many Negro men and boys got kilt on McCormack’s land when Isaiah Timmons faced McCormack with a shotgun looking for his missing sons. Back in ’09, that was. I guess the sheriff was jus’ ‘doin’ his job’ when he rounded up men that had nothin’ to do with Timmons and his gun—and nobody saw ’em again. ’Cuz, see, colored folks fighting for what’s theirs is like a virus to white folks—and they kill a virus so it don’t spread. That killing is the work of man, not the devil. And if there’s any such thing as evil on this earth, Gloria, it’s here in Gracetown. In the soil, hear? Gracetown soil remembers. It’s like a mirror that shines yo’ ugly back at you.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird