Boxofdelights > Boxofdelights's Quotes

“The book is still filtering down through my emotional Melitta and I will have further reports later,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Everything was accelerating now towards that crucial point. Point in the sense of time. Point in the sense of aim. Point in the sense of something so sharp it hurts.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“OLIVER DAVENANT did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. “Don’t!” he had once cried to her in loud agony.

In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart.

If this passion is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver’s life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor’s pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereals and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Brontë.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work.”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“You can't change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, talking the overview, you see pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness

“Oh, you're here already," she said, taken by surprise and feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness

“The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.

Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything. "You people with hearts," he said, "have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“There are three principles to remember if you are to teach a human being anything, and they are consistency, consistency, consistency.They are such fragile creatures to begin with, with poor eyes, poorer hearing, and no sense of smell left to speak of, it's no wonder they are made of fear. Some centuries ago they moved inside and with that move went nine-tenths of their intuition. It is almost unmerciful to make them live so long when they spend their lives in so much pain.”
― Pam Houston

“Good is not a thing you are. It's a thing you do.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal

“I gotta write Mrs. Finkelstein from Home Ec For Nerds a serious thank-you note.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel (2014-2015) #11

“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

“I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community. I hope that my being real with you will help empower you to step into who you are and encourage you to share yourself with those around you.”
― Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you regard women as people endowed with certain inalienable rights, then heterosexual sex -- as distinct from rape -- has to be something two people do together because both of them want to, but this notion of women as people is apparently baffling or objectionable to hordes of men, not just incels.

Women-as-bodies are sex waiting to happen -- to men -- and women-as-people are annoying gatekeepers getting between men and female bodies, which is why there's a ton of advice about how to trick or overwhelm the gatekeeper. Not just on incel and pick-up artist online forums but as jokey stuff in movies and books, going back to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova's trophy-taking.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“According to Aristotle, friends hold a mirror up to each other. This mirror allows them to see things they wouldn’t be able to observe if they were holding up the mirror to themselves. (We think of it as the difference between a shaky selfie and a really clear portrait taken by somebody else.) Observing ourselves in the mirror of others is how we improve as people. We can see our flaws illuminated in new ways, but we can also notice many good things we didn’t know were there. Until a friend specifically requests you bring your lemon meringue pie to brunch, you might not realize you’ve become an excellent baker. Until a friend finds the courage to tell you that she never feels like you’re listening to her, you might not realize this is how others are perceiving your chatterbox tendencies. After the third friend in a row calls you for help asking for a raise, you might finally give yourself credit as a pretty good negotiator. Once you’ve seen yourself in a mirror of friendship—in both positive and challenging ways—the reflection cannot be unseen.”
― Aminatou Sow, Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

“We can see now that "low-drama" was a cover for our tendency to avoid conflict, a way we both tried to minimize problems that actually needed to be addressed.”
― Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman

“Enjoyment is always greatest when you have enough contrast to measure it by.”
― M. Wylie Blanchet, The Curve of Time: The Classic Memoir of a Woman and Her Children Who Explored the Coastal Waters of the Pacific Northwest

“There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“From other stories that have been handed down to me I know that my people, like many others in the slave states, went to church with their slaves, were baptized with them, and presumably expected to associate with them in heaven. Again, I have been years realizing what this means, and what it has cost.

First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own? To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit. If there had ever opened a conscious connection between the two claims, if the two sides of his mind had ever touched, it would have been like building a fire in a house full of gunpowder: somewhere down deep in his mind he always knew of the danger, and his nerves were always alert to it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound

“I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness--the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.”
― Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound

“Avoid heavy equipment whenever possible; big machinery often fakes efficiency. Rain gardens are commonly dug out by backhoes and fine grading is done by skid loaders. Inappropriate or oversized equipment does more damage than good, and it takes years for a site to recover from the compaction and unnecessary disturbance. In the time spent waiting for machinery to be delivered to a site, a team of five could have prepared a planting area with three rakes, two shovels, and no compaction.”
― Thomas Rainer, Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes

“This is why reading representations of disability as simultaneously metaphor and materiality is so essential -- disability oscillates between abstraction and material meanings due to its social history.”
― Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

“There are several telltale signs of flawed gender theories. First, we should beware of any gender theory that makes the assumption that there is any one "right" or "natural" way to be gendered or to be sexual. Such theories are typically narcissistic in nature, as they merely reveal their designers' desire to cast themselves on top of the gender hierarchy. Further, if one presumes there is only one "right" or "natural" way to be gendered, then the only way to explain why some people display typical gender and sexual traits while others display exceptional ones is by surmising that one of those two groups is being intentionally led astray somehow. Indeed, this is exactly what the religious right argues when they invent stories about homosexuals who recruit young children via the "gay agenda". Those who claim that we are all born with bisexual, androgynous, or gender-neutral tendencies (only to be molded into heterosexual, masculine men and feminine women via socialization and gender norms) use a similar strategy.”
― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly
natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most
of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or
incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);
obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to
believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an
apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness
for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper
respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying
over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation
or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,
smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and
neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);
remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual
feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange
admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,
the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings
for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of
cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,
and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable
addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist