Mina > Mina's Quotes

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.”
― T. S. Eliot

“Why don't we want our children to learn to do mathematics? Is it that we don't trust them, that we think it's too hard? We seem to feel that they are capable of making arguments and coming to their own conclusions about Napoleon. Why not about triangles?”
― Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

“There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses: A Gripping Mother-Daughter Story of Political Activism, Crime, and Suspense in Modern-Day Pakistan

“For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
― Émile Zola

“That’s how badly people wanted it—to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“She was lost in that deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“Men know nothing of inevitable pain.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses: A Novel

“Who made love a heart without arteries and chambers—a castrated organ?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses: A Novel

“Purity without balance is its own corruption.”
― V.E. Schwab

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

“When we first heard, we thought it might be that type of secret, although, we have to admit, it had felt different. Tasted different too. All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season. But we didn’t.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Like most girls, she’d already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the difference.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn’t hide.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Oh, any of us could’ve told her to stay away from him. She wouldn’t have listened, of course. What did the church mothers know anyway? Not how Luke held her hand while they slept or played with her hair when they cuddled or how after she’d told him about the pregnancy test, he cradled her bare feet in his lap. A man who laced his fingers through yours all night and held your feet when you were sad had to love you, at least a little bit. Besides, what did a bunch of old ladies know? We would’ve told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“We don’t think of ourselves as “prayer warriors.” A man must’ve come up with that term—men think anything difficult is war. But prayer is more delicate than battle,”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“He wasn’t a bad kid but he was reckless. Black boys couldn’t afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“That’s what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it’s from and where it’ll return.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“You didn’t know how desperate you could be until you were.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“she hasn’t yet learned the mathematics of grief. The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers