Read Between the Time > Read Between the Time's Quotes

“That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Of course you can’t know. But you play the odds. You save who you can and you mourn those you can’t. When you follow this calling, your heart gets ripped apart every day. You make the world better in increments, not grand designs. You make choices. Do you understand?”
― Harlan Coben, Shelter

“You and I both have a choice.

We can stand with the starving or with the overfed.

We can identify with poor Lazarus on his way to heaven or with the rich man on his way to hell.

We can embrace Jesus while we give away our wealth, or we can walk away from Jesus while we hoard our wealth.”
― David Platt, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

“But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amide the greatest plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son, Full length play, Drama

“I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: 'English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache...The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.' And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless,inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I'd ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis, Miracles

“Despite the bad luck life had dealt him, he still had faith that tomorrow could indeed bring into being a new world.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“That is the “real” reader, the Dear Reader for whom every writer writes. And many Dear Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We hear the voice of a book speaking to us.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“The world’s heart is on fire, and race is at its core. What’s happening in the world today is the result of past actions. The bitter racial seeds from past beliefs and actions are blooming all around us, reflecting not only a division of races that is rooted in ignorance and hate, but also, and more solely, a division of heart.”
― Ruth King

“Most hidden, yet most present.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions Of St.Augustine

“But Benedict wished to suffer the world’s wrongs rather than its praises, and to be worn out by labors for God rather than flattered by worldly praise. So he quietly slipped away...”
― Terrence G. Kardong, The Life of St. Benedict by Gregory the Great: Translation and Commentary

“...it doesn’t make any difference. Whether we’re being lied to or not, we still have to get up and go to work and pay the bills and all the rest.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“
Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.”
― Daniel Quinn

“The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“what good am i if i do not fill the plates of the ones who fed me but fill the plates of strangers
-family”
― Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

“But intolerant,narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host,change form,and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“why is it that when the story ends we begin to feel all of it”
― Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

“Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The little blue engine looked up at the hill.
His light was weak, his whistle was shrill.
He was tired and small, and the hill was tall,
And his face blushed red as he softly said,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
So he started up with a chug and a strain,
And he puffed and pulled with might and main.
And slowly he climbed, a foot at a time,
And his engine coughed as he whispered soft,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

With a squeak and a creak and a toot and a sigh,
With an extra hope and an extra try,
He would not stop — now he neared the top —
And strong and proud he cried out loud,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!”

He was almost there, when — CRASH! SMASH! BASH!
He slid down and mashed into engine hash
On the rocks below... which goes to show
If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Every Trump voter is certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it was acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“The most powerful country in the world has handed over all of it's affairs, the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of it's water, the viability of it's air, the safety of it's food, the future of it's vast system of education, the soundness of it's national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of nuclear arsenal to a carnival barker who introduce the phrase "grab em by the pussy", into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say "if a black man can be president than any white man, no matter how fallen, can be president", and in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled. The American Tragedy now being wrought, is larger than most imaged and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality held that it's overt invocation would scare off moderate whites. This has proved to be only half-true at best. Trump's legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagague can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington, schooled in the methodology of governance, now liberated from the pretense of anti-racist civility, doing a much more effective job than Trump.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“Are you afraid of me? I mean, I read in a book... that people are scared off by people with diseases because it reminds them of their own mortality and stuff.”
― Meg Wolitzer, Sleepwalking

“Let’s take the city for example. I love that place-I realize this is a controversial statement in this crowd, but I do. Listen. I love its grey skies, its rude people, its disorder, its noise. I love the stories I’ve lived there, the landmarks...”
― Daniel Alarcón, The King Is Always Above the People: Stories

“I didn’t know what to say in a world where people were hated and attacked for not being the right color, not speaking the right language, not worshipping the right god or not loving the right people; a world where hatred was the common language, and bricks, the only words.”
― Bianca Marais, Hum If You Don't Know the Words

“Understand that I am already a Christian.”
Whereto he answered, “I will not believe it, nor will I rank you among Christians, unless I see you in the Church of Christ.”
The other, in banter, replied, “Do walls then make Christians?”
― Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine