Lindi > Lindi's Quotes

“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.”
― Anne Lamott

“He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.”
― Danzy Senna, Caucasia

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religions into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“They strolled toward town, stopping now and then to let him catch his breath and to gaze upward, for the west Kansas sky is black velvet on clear, cool December nights, and the Milky Way is strung across it like the diamond necklace of a crooked banker's mistress.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Doc

“Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.”
― Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

“The purpose of school should not be to prepare students for more school. We should be seeking to have fully engaged students now.”
― Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

“I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. ”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

“A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.”
― Colin Meloy, Wildwood

“Maybe that's the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.
A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“To leave the apple unpicked—that was sin.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite

“[D]on't ever apologise to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologise to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read...”
― Neil Gaiman

“[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.”
― William Deresiewicz

“When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.”
― Sean O'Casey, THREE MORE PLAYS BY SEAN O'CASEY:THE SILVER TASSIE;PURPLE DUST;RED ROSES FOR ME [Paperback]

“Now, in a shift of light, the shadows of birds are more pronounced on the gallery’s white wall. The shadow of each bird is speaking to me. Each shadow doubles the velocity, ferocity of forms. The shadow, my shadow now merges with theirs. Descension. Ascension. The velocity of wings creates the whisper to awaken….
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do.”
― Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan

“We could look at the side of wonder.”
― Melina Marchetta

“In the end, the sum of my vices is all me.”
― Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn

“Sir Topher finally looked up. “Because any hope beyond that, my boy, would be too much. I feared we would drown in it.”
"Then I choose to drown,” Finnikin said. “In hope. Rather than float into nothing.”
― Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock

“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”
― Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock

“Ned?' he says, after a while. 'Oi, Ned?'
'What?'
'If someone says to you that the guy they're going out with doesn't have to prove how smart he is, what's your response?'
'That he's dumb.'
'And if he has a sixpack?'
'Dumb jock.'
'Not too intense.'
'Dumb jock with no personality.'
'And they see eye to eye?'
Ned pauses. 'With the spitfire from Dili?'
'Same,' Tom corrects.
Ned holds up a hand to where Tara would reach him in height.
'Dumb jock with no personality and short-man syndrome.'
'Thanks, Ned.'
'Anytime.”
― Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son