Laila Collman > Laila's Quotes

“What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“My nature is to be cheerful and my foolish self is very likely to be led astray by happy, frivolous things, things of the moment, and I just can’t help it, Jaimy, I can’t. There is a wildness in me that can’t be denied. I”
― L.A. Meyer, Viva Jacquelina!: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, Over the Hills and Far Away – A Rip-Roaring YA Spy Novel in Historical Spain

“my credo, “Oftimes it seems to me, ‘patriotic’ rhymes with ‘idiotic,”
― L.A. Meyer, Viva Jacquelina!: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, Over the Hills and Far Away – A Rip-Roaring YA Spy Novel in Historical Spain

“He was not so arrogant as to refer to his own death as The End, just one of billions of ends before The End. Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.”
― Joseph Fink, It Devours!

“But a person doesn’t need experience or knowledge of something to have opinions about it. It turns out all they need for that are opinions.”
― Joseph Fink, It Devours!

“The sky once loved a certain rock. Bur millennia of erosion transformed the rock to dust. The sky, not understanding, still signals for its friend who abandoned it. The rock never knew about the sky. The rock only loved the wind that was slowly eroding it.”
― Joseph Fink, It Devours!

“He recognized them for what they were: humans, who were right about some things and wrong about other things and certain about everything.”
― Joseph Fink, It Devours!

“It felt like illness, but it was only existence.”
― Joseph Fink, It Devours!

“If everyone in the world took care of each other the way folks do out on the trail, and if everyone approached each day with as much hope and optimism as hikers do, the world would be a better place.”
― Jon Tullis, Walk Think Write: Midlife Passages On Oregon's Pacific Crest Trail

“Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren put it eloquently: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“Your business has to be in good-enough shape that it’s not going to crumble just because someone is taking care of their children. If your business can’t handle that, then you have a problem with either your business model or your management.”
― Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

“What if the entire purpose of the state in the twenty-first century, as agreed upon and expressly stated by its citizens, was not to take more power away from the people, but just the opposite: to push the modern values of freedom and independence even further, to provide the people with the logistical foundation for the most comprehensive form of individual liberty possible?”
― Anu Partanen

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“So many times I've wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I'd been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I'd be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road our lives are made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.”
― Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir

“Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center of meaningful human experiences.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Ничто не вечно в этом мире, даже горе.”
― Юрий Казаков, Голубое и зеленое

“A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system- a patch of soil, a human body- and the health of one is connected- literally- to the health of the other.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

“Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring- to the carelessness of both consumers and producers.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

“I encourage people to remember that "no" is a complete sentence.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“She tried to recall the cold, the silence, and that precious feeling of owning the world, of being twenty years old and having her whole life ahead of her, of making love slowly and calmly, drunk with the scent of the forest and their love, without a past, without suspecting the future, with just the incredible richness of that present moment in which they stared at each other, smelled each other, kissed each other, and explored each other's bodies, wrapped in the whisper of the wind among the trees and the sound of the nearby waves breaking against the rocks at the foot of the cliff, exploding in a crash of pungent surf, and the two of them embracing underneath a single poncho like Siamese twins, laughing and swearing this night would last forever, that they were the only ones in the whole world who had discovered love.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression - and with all this yet to die.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“These are the only genuine ideas: the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“We had the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Suffering is life.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“There are as many kinds of love, as there are hearts”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina