Marne - Reader By the Water > Marne - Reader By the Water's Quotes

“My generation had never known a world without the OASIS. To us, it was much more than a game or an entertainment platform. It had been an integral part of our lives for as far back as we could remember. We’d been born into an ugly world, and the OASIS was our one happy refuge.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“My favorite chick was the tawny-colored Buff Orpington. She promised to one day be a bodacious plus-sized model of a chicken, wearing fluffy pantaloons under full feathery skirts and with as charming a personality as her appearance suggested. Predictably named Buffy, she didn’t mind being handled and rather seemed to enjoy the company, clucking softly with a closed beak as I picked her up and stroked her silky feathers.”
― Lucie B. Amundsen, Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-changing Egg Farm - from Scratch

“For the guests of Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday party, most of the day was spent wandering from window to window, maybe playing a hand of cards or looking at a magazine, as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.”
― Ann Patchett, ❴Bel :Canto

“I’d always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unsolicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color commentary.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“It was the longest, most exquisite high of my life, but the hangover came first.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“It’s neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can’t do it.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“One of the most interesting discoveries of this whole journey was that I didn’t need my demons to fuel my drive—and that taming them was a more satisfying exercise than indulging them.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“By week two, my once-burning flame of wanderlust began to die down to a flicker. And when adventure begins to lose its appeal, it starts to feel more like adversity.”
― Jennifer Pharr Davis, Becoming Odyssa : Adventures on the Appalachian Trail

“I don’t understand why people insist on pitting the concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What’s wrong with that idea?”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“All around us that morning, the noise of the crickets was astounding, the squeak and whine of so many new bodies in the dark—they’d been multiplying since the slowing. All the bugs had. More and more birds were dying, and with so few of them left, everything smaller was thriving. More and more spiders were crawling on our ceilings too. Beetles emerged from bathroom drains. Worms slithered over the cement of our patios. One soccer practice was canceled when a million ladybugs descended on the field at once. Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“Certain clock nights still coincided with the dark, but perfect alignment was rare. Whenever a lightless night did roll around, we slept as much as we could. But it was never enough. We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour but unable to store the rain.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“In ancient times, soldiers called it going amok—a descent into the battle craziness that took you out of yourself and dropped you into the warrior’s world of blood and darkness. Going amok was a form of insanity prized by the Greeks and Spartans and Vikings—it made for great warriors. Thus did Achilles slay Hector, Beowulf defeat Grendel. But unless you bring your heroes back to themselves—with a ritual purification or with a journey of some sort, like Odysseus’s long struggle home or World War II vets taking weeks to sail back across the sea together—there is a price to pay when the bloodied warrior returns. These days, soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan alone and in a matter of hours. We drop them back into society as if they were widgets that have simply gone missing for a while. But a lot of the widgets are bent hopelessly out of shape.”
― Barbara Nickless, Blood on the Tracks

“My body was so filled with pain that I could not separate the hurt within from that without. And I was tired. Tired in Cohen’s way, tired with the weight that makes your bones two inches shorter. I was tired of killing. Tired of death. Exhausted from scraping up against the kind of hatred that makes a man slap a little girl, slaughter a woman, shoot a dog. All I wanted was to lie in the snow and the dark and think about Clyde and Dougie and Cohen until I ran out of thoughts. Ran out of feelings. Until the wind abraded my skin to nothing and I was only disarticulated bones.”
― Barbara Nickless, Blood on the Tracks

“Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it’s been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week—a miracle, people say, as if they’ve been educated from greeting cards. I’m sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It’s true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave—now there’s a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Do you know who is up at four in the morning? Dairy farmers. Paperboys. Lunatics.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“The firelight had restored his face to healthy color and she, all Frenchbraided, scarf unslung, resembled an opportunity missed by Rembrandt.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“Sleep that day was a warm pool into which I dove and stayed, sporadically lifting my head to sense the world.”
― Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

“But our goal, remember, is to feed around our table the people we love. We’re not chefs or restaurateurs or culinary school graduates, and we shouldn’t try to be. Make it the way the people you love want to eat it.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Risotto is one of those dishes you just have to try a few times yourself, to teach yourself the moves and sounds and smells and textures. This is a guide map, but kind of a rough and tattered one.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“there are interesting, smart, kind people just absolutely everywhere, and that when you do things you care about, you find quick kinship with people who are passionate about those same things.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Recipes are how we learn all the rules, and cooking is knowing how to break them to suit our tastes or preferences.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“But it isn’t about perfection, and it isn’t about performance. You’ll miss the richest moments in life—the sacred moments when we feel God’s grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love—if you’re too scared or too ashamed to open the door.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“I hear that old song I’ve heard all my life: You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough. But that voice is a lie. And it’s a terrible guide. When I listen to it, I burn the candle at both ends and try to light the middle while I’m at it. The voice of God invites us to full, whole living—to rest, to abundance, to enough. To say no. To say no more. To say I’m going to choose to live wholly and completely in the present, even though this ragged, run-down person I am right now is so far from perfect.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

“Are you familiar with the real estate between a cow’s eyeballs? For the purposes of simulation, drape a thin rug over a concrete block and then hit it bare-fisted as hard as you can.”
― Michael Perry, Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting – A Heartfelt and Humorous Memoir of Wisconsin Farming and Fatherhood

“Watching Ann bolt at the start of a race was like watching a mild-mannered reporter yank off his glasses and sling on a crimson cape.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen