Geraldine > Geraldine's Quotes

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― 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

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Arrogance is a very good thing to have when you’re starting, and that means saying to yourselves that you’re going to be the number one group, not the number two group.”
― Greg Brooks, Freddie Mercury: His Life in His Own Words

“Some things you got to release. Gary said. The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“Southam’s research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who’d injected children with hepatitis and others who’d poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam’s study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists’ fears, the ethical crackdown didn’t slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“But more than anything, they worried that since everyone was using different media ingredients, recipes, cells, and techniques, and few knew their peers’ methods, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate one another’s experiments. And replication is an essential part of science: a discovery isn’t considered valid if others can’t repeat the work and get the same result.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.”
― Rebecca Skloot, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Había estado en la muerte, en efecto, pero había regresado porque no pudo soportar la soledad.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit

“It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“People have told me that a wolf looks right through you. But you know what I realize? That's because a wolf isn't interested in you. It's always hard for humans to accept that we're not the most important thing anyone's ever seen.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“I don’t mean to imply that I value the life of a fish or a bird the same way I value a human life, but their presence in the world has as much validity as does our presence. Perhaps more: they were here first; they are foundational to us. They take only what they need. They are compatible with the life around them.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“The work here isn't to figure out why they didn't like you, or who's right and who's wrong. It's to practice being okay with the idea that there are some people who will get you and some people who won't...and that's fine.”
― Reshma Saujani, Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder

“One of the hallmarks of happiness is having close, meaningful connections with others. But keeping up a facade of having it all together keeps us isolated, because it keeps us from forging real, honest, deep relationships where we can fully be ourselves and feel accepted exactly as we are.”
― Reshma Saujani, Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder

“We can't become unique by copying someone else's formula any more than we can become successful by striving for someone else's definition of success. And really, what's the point of succeeding by someone else's rules anyway?”
― Reshma Saujani, Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder