Tina > Tina's Quotes

“I think I know why you never married, Sarah."
"Well, and I reckoned if I wanted something that'd come and go as he pleased, take me for granted, and ignore me when he chose, I'd get a cat. And if I wanted something I'd always have to be picking up after, getting into trouble, but slavishly devoted,
I'd get a dog.”
― Mercedes Lackey

“She had had insomnia badly when she was fresh from Home.... She had had only occasional bad nights since then. Bad? she thought. Why bad? I rarely feel much the worse the next day, except for a sort of moral irritability that seems to go with the feeling that I ought to have spent all those silent hours asleep.”
― Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

“The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, a giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn...
Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn... There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well...
And us?”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed corn, walking.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Store items from the same category in one spot. If you are living with a family, sort by person first, then by category, and finally by type of material. If you follow this order, storage will be much simpler.”
― Marie Kondō, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

“As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Cohen testified that there was no 'direct relationship' linking heart disease to dietary fats, and that he had been able to induce the same blood-vessel complications seen in heart disease merely by feeding sugar to his laboratory rats. Peter Cleave testified to his belief that the problem extended to all refined carbohydrates. 'I don't hold the cholesterol view for a moment,' Cleave said, noting that mankind had been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. 'For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life... but, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up... that is a very different proposition.”
― Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

“that we would receive the overwhelming message that the vast majority of adults feel they have no talent in these areas. On the other hand, if we were to conduct the same poll among 4-year-olds, we would find that virtually all of them are convinced they can sing, and virtually all of them have confidence in their ability to dance. Most of the 4-year-olds have little or no real talent, but, instead, they are endowed with incredible confidence in their own potential. This confidence, or certainty of success, is something we were all born with but we later traded in for a strong dose of what we call realism. Shortly after we reach school age, we are taught lessons about the world that revolve around us, limiting our vision and becoming realistic.”
― Jim Stovall, Wisdom for Winners Volume One: A Millionaire Mindset, An Official Official Publication of The Napoleon Hill Foundation®

“I defy you to find a statue or a monument ever erected to anyone because they were realistic. All dreamers, all achievers, all great people kept their child-like faith in their own dream and their ability to carry it out, and these great people had an inordinate gift to disregard the word's cries for reality.”
― Jim Stovall, Wisdom for Winners Volume One: A Millionaire Mindset, An Official Official Publication of The Napoleon Hill Foundation®

“It's just supposed to come, isn't it?”

“Did your reading just come to you? Or did you have to devote effort to it? The seed of the gift may come, but a seedling that isn't nourished dies quickly.”
― Mary E. Pearson, The Kiss of Deception

“As you learn to fight, you learn to defend yourself from physical harm. You acquire a powerful self-preserving skill set, and a specific attitude. This attitude carries across to other aspects of your life. So that you can defend yourself from other less tangible but far more dangerous things that can break you—not just your body, but your spirit. Things such as deception, corruption, disparagement, coercion, false accusation and persecution. Subtle evil things that undermine you.”
― Vera Nazarian

“The thing I fear most comes at the will of another. It is not something I can force, it is not something I can change, and it is not something I can control.”
― Quinn Loftis, Into the Fae

“The best way to stop a little debater in his tracks is a tool I call reverse negotiation. It works like a charm. Here is how it is done: you tell your child that negotiating will no longer be tolerated. If you are thinking that it's not that simple, you would be right. But wait, there is more--you add that when your child negotiates, not only does he not get what he was asking for, but he gets less than what he started with. Let's give it a whirl:

PARENT: Bedtime is at eight.
CHILD: I want to stay up until eight thirty.
PARENT: No, it's eight.
CHILD: I want to stay up later.
PARENT: Now bedtime is seven forty-five.
CHILD: Fine, I'll take eight.
PARENT: Now bedtime is at seven thirty.”
― Robin Berman, Permission to Parent: How to Raise Your Child with Love and Limits

“We do not write the story of childhood with a dry-erase board, we write with a permanent Sharpie.”
― Sue Enquist

“Labels and comparisons really are no-win. If it is a positive label, kids will always fear losing it. If it is a negative label, someone gets stuck with it.”
― Robin Berman, Permission to Parent: How to Raise Your Child with Love and Limits

“Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble.

Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away.

I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do.

And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Imagine how much you’ve got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it.
Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them.
Suddenly it’s all the stuff you’ve left undone.
All the kindness you could’ve given.
All the excuses you gave instead.
Imagine that for a minute.
Imagine what it means.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Son,'he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce