Sara Strack > Sara's Quotes

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“Chernobyl haunts us with the reminder that all of man’s ambitions are ephemeral. Our grandest designs and sturdiest monuments,”
― Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

“...things can happen when you least expect them so you always gotta be prepared. And pay attention to the details. The devil is in the details.”
― Lesley Kagen, Whistling in the Dark

“The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“The magnificent thing about her [Amelia Earhart] is, in the eyes of the world, she simply never died. Her fear never witnessed, her failure never recorded, her shiny twin-engine Electra never recovered. Earhart's legacy of inspiration is amplified because her adventure is perpetual. We don't think of her as dead; we think of her as missing. She is forever flying, somewhere beyond Lae, over that limitless blue horizon.”
― Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

“...you look at me like an emergency”
― Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“Sometimes what a person needs most is to be forgiven.”
― Jennifer McMahon, Island of Lost Girls

“Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances, after all, have explanations.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Focus, Amy. Just because he looked great in the saddle did not mean he wasn't an axe murderer.”
― Rosemary Clement-Moore, Texas Gothic

“Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went off to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm – hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”
― Arundhati Roy , The God of Small Things

“It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman. Better yet, ask a journalist. Disappearances are bread-and-butter to journalists.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“I could feel the hair rising on my forearms, as though with cold, and rubbed them uneasily. Two hundred years. From 1945 to 1743; yes, near enough. And women who traveled through the rocks. Was it always women? I wondered suddenly.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“As though, knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“Those small spaces of time, too soon gone, when everything seems to stand still, and existence is balanced on a perfect point, like the moment of change between the dark and the light, when both and neither surround you.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander