Kari Yergin > Kari's Quotes

“What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.”
― Edward Albee

“The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.”
― Billy Collins

“Life is the dancer and you are the dance.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,
only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language does this to our memories, simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An off-told story is like a photograph in a family album. Eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“There are moments in history that seem like a mist, as if what really happens matters less that what should have happened. The mists lift suddenly and there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost. Just for a moment I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“It was one of those subjects to which everything that slithers across your brain seems relevant. I find this to be true of most topics.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“the happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“...the sea's only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head...”
― Primo Levi

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
― Charles R. Swindoll

“It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn’t whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up. The thing is, I didn’t know how to whistle. I guessed I was going to have to learn.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

“I don't know what to say," she said, after a pause. "I don't want to tell you a lie, and I don't know the truth."
It was maybe the most honest thing anyone had ever said to me.”
― Kimberly Brubaker-Bradley, The War That Saved My Life

“If I started letting myself feel afraid I would never be able to stop.”
― Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, The War I Finally Won

“... deep inside you was a frantic longing to be something or someone other than you are. It is the greatest scourge a man can suffer, and the most painful. Life becomes bearable only when one has come to terms with who one is, both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of the world. We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not gong to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our pot-belly. No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

“My mother was my first country, the first place I ever lived.”
― Nayyirah Waheed