Katie Garoni > Katie's Quotes

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them.”
― Tara Westover

“Trees so bent they wore the shape of the wind.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.”
― Helen Exley

“Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.”
― Margaret Mead

“My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.”
― Rumi

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

“What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

“I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. / I awoke and saw that life was service. / I acted and behold, service was joy.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

“Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
― C.S. Lewis

“By their very nature, human being are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration -- and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
― Amor Towles

“...new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

“I think we’re all little cathedrals of contradiction. Terrifying darkness and shocking beauty coexist in everyone, and God doesn’t wait for us to clean out all the bad before celebrating the good. It’s scandalous, really—that kind of love.”
― Bethany Joy Lenz, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show

“If you marry for money, you end up earning every penny.”
― Jill Mansell, Rumour Has it

“I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,” he added, turning to me. “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it... yet.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“No one else will ever know the strength of my love for you. After all, you’re the only one who knows the sound of my heart from the inside.”
― Kristen Proby, Fight with Me