Beartown ~ Fredrik Backman

"All organizations like to boast that they're building a culture, but when it comes down to it everyone really only cares about one sort: 

the culture of winning."

"We love winners, even though they're rarely particularly likeable people.  That doesn't matter.  We like them while they're winning".

"One of the hardest things about getting old is admitting mistakes that it's too late to put right."

"The worst things about having power over other people's lives is that you sometimes get things wrong."

"You can't look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness."

"Seen from the stands, you are either a genius or utterly worthless; never anything in between."

"We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger."

"That tendency exists in all sports;  parents always think their own expertise increases automatically as their child gets better at something.  As if the reverse weren't actually the case."

"The most painful fall for anyone is tumbling down through a hierarchy."

"Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride."

"Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit."

"When you accept the worse aspects of your teammates because you love the collective, that's when you are a team player."

"It's only a game.  It can only change peoples' lives."

"He's a team player.  And the starting point for that is always understanding your own role, and its limitations."

"Do you know what happens to coal if you apply enough pressure to it?  It turns into diamonds."

"The only time I'm not moving forward is when I'm taking aim."

"We become what we are told we are."

"A long marriage is complicated."

"A great deal is expected of anyone who's been given a lot."

"And there are no winners without losers, no stars are born without others in the collective being sacrificed."

"Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that's always too small. 

No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there's always someone who's freezing."

"One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position or have it forced upon you,

is that leadership is as much about what you don't say as what you do say."

"Concentrate on the things you can change."

"We're a team.  We give each other power.  When one man falls, another steps up."

"There's always someone who's worse.  You can get almost anything to look normal if you make enough comparisons."

"Hate is a deeply stimulating emotion.  The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard.  It makes demands. 

Hate is simple."

"There are damn few things in life harder than admitting to yourself that you're a hypocrite."

"Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds.  Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with."

"A simple truth, repeated a often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can't do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right."

"Desire always beats luck."

​

"And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming."

​

Alias Grace ~ Margaret Atwood

"Who seems to think that a conscience recently discovered excuses them for not having had any conscience at all at an earlier period."

"It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between."

"The small details of life often hide a great significance."

"For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it."

"Those who have been in trouble themselves are alert to it in others."

"Just because a man is known to lie, it does not follow that he always does so."

"A little white lie such as the angels tell is a small price to pay for peace and quiet."

 

A shadow flits before me,

Not there, but like to thee.

Ah, Christ, that it were possible

For one short hour to see

The souls we loved, that they might tell us

What are where they be!

 ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson (Maud 1855)

​

Us Against You ~ Fredrik Backman

"A parent's love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible."

"There are three types of people:  winners, losers, and the ones who watch."

"The idea that violence can ever be controlled is always an illusion."

"When politics work in our favor we call it "cooperation", and when it favors others we call it "corruption". "

"A long marriage consists of such small things that when they get lost we don't even know where to start looking for them."

"Everyone who loves sports knows that a game isn't decided only by what happens but just as much by what doesn't."

"When it comes down to it, everyone has something to say about the life he should have had instead of this one."

"Morality is a luxury."

"Power is the ability to get other people to do what you want."

"It's hard to admit that we've been wrong.  And the bigger the mistake, the harder it is."
"What are we prepared to do for our children at that moment?  What aren't we prepared to do?"

"Almost all fights are won or lost long before they start."

"Our fantasy worlds always have consequences for other people's realities."

"Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments.  It's said that a person's first thought is the most honest but that often isn't true.  Why else would we have afterthoughts?"

"It's always so easy to say what everyone should have done when you know what they actually did didn't work."

"It's only words.  Only letters.  Only a human being."

"Things like this are no one's fault.  But it's plenty of people's fault.  Ours."

"Feelings are complicated.  Actions are simple."
"What would you do for your family?  What wouldn't you do?"

"It's only words.  Combination of letters.  How can they possibly hurt anyone?"
"At some point almost everyone makes a choice.  Some of us don't even notice it happening, most of us don't get to plan it in advance, but there's always a moment when we take one path instead of another that has consequences for the rest of our lives. 

It determines the people we will become, in other people's eyes as well as our own."
"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."

"....but the people chanting are exposed now.  So everyone can see that there aren't as many of them as we think.  There never are."

​

"Was it worth it?  How are we supposed to know that in advance?"
"But choosing sides in a conflict is rarely about who you're standing alongside and almost always who you're standing against."

 

The Gold Coast ~ Nelson DeMille

"One can be a product only of one's own era, not anyone else's."

"I don't mean to sound racist, but I am curious as to why wealthy foreigners want to buy our houses, wear our clothes, and emulate our manners.  I suppose I should be flattered, and I suppose I am.  I mean, I never had a desire to sit in a tent and eat camel meat with my fingers."

"Well, no one ever said the truth would make you happy - only free."

 

"....and I wish that for one magic hour on a summer's evening, a weary nation would pause and reflect, and each man and woman remember how the world once looked and smelled and felt and how nice it was to draw such supreme comfort and security by the simple act of putting one's hand into the hand of a father or mother."

​

"Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction." - Matthew 7:13

​

"If Ethel and I agree on anything, it is probably Mark Twain's observation that 'there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress'."

"To evade taxes is illegal; to avoid taxes is legal.  And I might add, a civil right and moral obligation."

"When you cheat at poker, life, or taxes, you've taken the honor and fun out of winning, and ultimately you've cheated yourself out of the finest pleasure in life; beating the other guy fair and square."

"When they (IRS) decide to stick it up your ass with a felony, we're both looking at the same five or ten years, and maybe more.  You get time off for good behavior after you're inside, not before."

 

Paranoia ~ Joseph Finder

"When the reality is that if you email an off-color, politically incorrect joke to your buddy in IT, who then cc's it to a guy a few cubicles over, you can end up locked in a sweaty HR conference room for a grueling week of Diversity Training."

"Dude, it's never too late to have a happy childhood."

"The only power tyrants have is that relinquished by their victims."

"Cause every tool is a weapon if you hold it right"...Ani DiFranco

"Your past-you can't be a captive to it, but you can't discard it, either.  It's part of you."

"It's true what they say.  Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it."

 

A Man Called Ove ~ Fredrik Backman

"....all roads lead to something you were always predestined to do."

"They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they'd never done anything wrong."

"All people want to live dignified lives; dignity just means something different to different people."

"Sometimes it is difficult to explain why some men suddenly do the things they do.  Sometimes, of course, it's because they know they'll do them sooner or later anyway, so they may as well just do them now.  And sometimes it's the pure opposite - because they realize they should have done them long ago."

"We always think there's enough time to do things with other people.  And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words life 'if'."

"The great thing about scrutinizing bureaucracy when you're a journalist, you see, is that the first people to break the laws of the bureaucracy are always the bureaucrats themselves."

"Death is a strange thing.  We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves.  For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by.  And leave us there alone."

"And time is a curious thing.  Most of us live for the time that lies right ahead of us.  One of the most painful moments in a person's life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead.  And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be lived for."

 

my grandmother told me to tell you she's sorry ~ Fredrik Backman

"Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems.  Idiots can't understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have.  That's why idiots are always so scared and aggressive.  Because nothing scares idiot more than a smart girl."

"People who have never been hunted always seem to think there's a reason for it.  'They wouldn't do it without a cause, would they?  You must have done something to provoke them.'  As if that's how oppression works."

"Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you."

"Sometimes the safest place is when you flee to what seems the most dangerous."

 

*READ Pages 116 & 117*

 

"And that was how the people of Miaudacas learned that a queen only stays in power for as long as her subjects are afraid of conflict."

"You have standards and I have double standards and so I win."

"Everything seems obvious in hindsight!"

"It's strange how close love and fear live to each other."

"Never mess with someone who's perky for her age."

"People are afraid of environmental organizations, they think we'll storm the flat (apartment) and accuse them of not handling their waste properly."

"It's hard to help those who don't want to help themselves."

"The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living."

"People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will 'lessen as time passes', but it isn't true."

"Don't kick the shit, it'll go all over the place!"

"Where that factory used to be where they made heat exchangers before the bastards moved everything to Asia."

"Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit.  The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can."

"We want to be loved.  Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated, and despised.  At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others."

"They construct words of forgiveness from the ruins of fighting words."

​

Nine Perfect Strangers ~ Liane Moriarty

"How was she going to cope for ten days without instant answers to idle questions."

"How quickly people adapted to strange rules and regulations!"

"Other people's problems were so simple; one's own problem tended to be so much more nuanced."

"People are frightened of what they don't understand."

"The secret of a happy marriage is not to go looking for it."

 

The Testaments ~ Margaret Atwood

"The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morality pure generation that is surely about to arrive.  Such is the theory."

"Wait, I counsel them silently; it will get worse."

"Knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge.  ...every intelligence agency in the world has always known it."

"I was of the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing."

"I have long been a believer in checks and balances."

"....although the flag of the erstwhile United States of America has been painted over with that of Gilead."

"If only I'd packed up early enough, as some did, and left the country - the country that I still foolishly thought was the same country to which I had for so many years belonged."

"I made choices, and then, having made them, I had few choices."

"In that vanished country of mine, things had been on a downward spiral for  years.  Why did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual?  You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you."  (Read page 66).

"Is there ever a convincing excuse when there's blood on the carpet?"

"Stupid, stupid, stupid:  I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual.  ....I'd depended on that as if on a magic charm."  (Read page 116).

"What would my wish be now?  That time would move backwards?  That it would be yesterday?  I wonder how many people have ever wished that."

"As they say:  if you aren't looking, you don't see."

"How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment.  It's always the same plot."

"Sorry solves nothing."

"One person alone is not a person:  we exist in relation to others."

"The powerless are so tempting."

"Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up.  Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity."

"Reign of terror, they use to say, but terror does not exactly reign.  Instead it paralyzes.  Hence the unnatural quiet."

"Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?"

"Once a story you've regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories. "

"The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it."

"Know your enemy,"

"And how easily a hand becomes a fist."

"Totalitarianisms may crumble from within, as they fail to keep the promises that brought them to power; or they may be attacked from without; or both."

 

GIrl Wash Your Face ~ Rachel Hollis

"God has perfect timing, and it's highly possible that by not being where you thought you should be, you will end up exactly where you're meant to go."

​

Gone Baby Gone ~ Dennis Lehane

"You can never know people.  Can you?  Understand them.  It's not possible,  You can't...fathom what makes them do the things they do, think the way they do.  If it's not the way you think, it never makes sense.  Does it?"

​

Ophelia ~ Lisa Klein

"Virtuous though you may be, a reputation is a fragile thing, easily lost and often never regained."

​

Another Woman ~ Penny Vincenzi

"You shouldn't let love go.  It doesn't often come back."

"You must surely know that to a parent a child is always welcomed, always loved, whatever it has done.  We forgive our children anything, anything at all.  If we are human."

 

Lisey's Story ~ Stephen King

"Sometimes just enough is just enough."

"The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey."

"I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give."

"...what's done can't be undone, and what's remembered must somehow be lived with ever after."

"...but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them."

"You always were the steel in his spine."

"Every long marriage has two hears, one light and one dark."

 

"You are the call and I am the answer,

You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,

You are the night, and I the day,

What else?  It is perfect enough.

It is perfectly complete. You and I,

What more - ?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!"

-D.H. Lawrence

​

A Slow Fire Burning ~ Paula Hawkins

"But power shifts, doesn't it, sometimes in unexpected ways."

"In any sort of conflict, there are bound to be innocent casualties."

"Still, Barker said nothing.  That old trick again, to make you talk, to press you into filling the silence."

"She believed that if you worked hard enough at something, most often you would achieve it."

"...there were consequences these days, to everything you did.  Everything was recorded and committed to cyberspace for eternity - if you stepped out of line you'd be shamed on the internet, pilloried on Twitter, "canceled".  It was mob rule, not that you were allowed to say it.  Saying it would get you canceled too."

"Only once you'd fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you?  It was too late by then."

 

Troubled Blood ~ Robert Galbreath

   (aka J.K. Rowling)

"He had an odd double impression of being exactly where he belonged, and where he'd never belonged, of intense familiarity and of separateness."

"Her insistence on the smooth passing of counterfeit social coin from hand to hand, while uncomfortable truths were ignored and denied, wore him out."

"What's with this mania for treating them all the same?  Useful life lesson, I'd have thought, realizing you aren't owed.  You don't get stuff automatically because of who you are related to."

"Social identity theory (is) very interesting.  That and self-categorization theory.  There are implications for business as well as society."

"In essence, we tend to sort each other and ourselves into groupings, and that usually leads to an overestimation of similarities between members of a group, and an underestimation of the similarities between insiders and outsiders."

"She believed....that 'bloodshed' and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause."

​

Anxious People ~ Fredrik Backman

"We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there'll be another one coming along tomorrow."

"Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is?  That you're always judged by your worst moments.  Parents are defined by their mistakes."

"Because that was a parent's job; to provide shoulders...sometimes to lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.  They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven't yet realized that we don't actually know what we're doing."

"...children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them.  One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving."

"...it's impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that."

"...in recent years society has turned into a place where nothing is named according to what it is anymore.  It's hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it's full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer."

"....sometimes it's easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either."

"Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works.  We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of 'Don't forgets!' and 'Remembers' over us."

"Life doesn't always turn out the way you expect."

"...seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs."

"You probably have someone in your life whom you'd do something stupid for." 

"And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things."

"Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that's probably because it's full of shit."

"...ask yourself three questions before you flare up.  One:  Are the actions of the person in question intended to harm you personally?  Two:  Do you possess all the information about the situation?  Three:  Do you have anything to gain from a conflict?"

"You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue:  the longer they've been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight."

"Criticism doesn't help anyone improve."

"Parenthood can lead to a sequence of years when children's feelings suck all the oxygen out of a family, and that can be so emotionally intense that some adults go for years without having an opportunity to tell anyone about their own feelings, and if you don't get a chance for long enough, sometimes you simply forget how to do it."

"You love each other until you can't live without each other.  And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can't live without each other."

"Addicts are addicted to their drugs and their families are addicted to hope."

"Because the people we argue with hardest of all are not the ones who are completely different from us, but the ones who are almost no different at all."

"Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort."

"He says you end up marrying the one you don't understand.  Then you spend the rest of your life trying."

"...loneliness is like starvation, you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat."

"Not knowing is a good place to start."

"...because children from broken homes don't believe in everlasting love."

"Life knocked her flat.  That happens to most of us at ome point.  Maybe you, too."

"But maybe you've had the occasional really bad idea, too.  Maybe you deserved a second chance.  Maybe you're not alone in that."

 

The Whispering Room ~ Dean Koontz

"If I believed everything I see in the new, I wouldn't be a journalist, I'd be an idiot."

"No one ever really knew anyone or what they might be capable of doing.  Except for a spouse.  And even then, not always."

"Self-identified intellectuals were among the most dangerous people on the planet.  The problem was, all intellectuals first self-identified as such before others accepted their tatus and sought them for words of wisdom.  They didn't need to pass a test to confirm their brilliance, didn't appear before a credentialed board...It was easier to be celebrated as an intellectual than to get a hairdresser's license."

 

Magic Lessons ~ Alice Hoffman

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."  William Shakespeare

"What people believed often came to be, and blame was placed where it was imagined."

"Bad news often came this way, without warning, on what appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary day."

"No one knows where time goes, all the same it disappears."

"Love was the thing that tore you apart, it made you believe the lies you were told, obvious as they might be."

"It was nearly impossible to see your own fate while it was happening to you.  It was only after, when what's done had been done, that one's vision cleared."

"When you make certain choices, you change your fate."

"Some people can lie while they look at you and manage to hide their falseness."

"Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another heart in your hand."

"Some people grow weak when they are victimized, others grow stronger, and still others combine those two attributes to become dangerous."

"Know what you want, and be sure of it, for regret gives birth to more regret and nothing more."

"There are none who can fight as fiercely as a mother and a daughter, and none who can forgive more completely."

 

Practical Magic ~ Alice Hoffman

"Many of us know what it's like to try to escape a family legacy of one sort or another, only to discover that in the long run we carry our heritage with us no matter how far we might run."

"Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think."

"That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing.  That's why language was invented."

 

A Nearly Normal Family ~ M.T. Edvardsson

"It takes a long time to build a life, but only an instant for it to crumble.  It takes many years - decades, maybe a lifetime - to become the person you truly are.  The path is almost always circuitous, and I think there's a reason for that, for life to be built around trial and error.  We are shaped and created by our trials."

"Lying is an art that few people fully master."

"Being a parent mean never being able to relax."

"It's so easy to believe that the best is always yet to come.  I suspect that's a deeply human fault.  Even God instructs us to yearn."

"Experience tells me that when you dislike someone on such vague grounds, the problem often rests with you."

"It's crazy, the opinions people have about other people's children."

"What is a lie?  Just as there are different sorts of truths, there must be different sorts of lies.  Better a kind lie than a hurtful truth."

"I am adamant in my belief that nothing could be as difficult as being a parent.  All other relationships have an emergency exit.  You can leave and move on and still make it out okay.  But you can never renounce your child."

"The power to condemn belongs to the people, no matter the opinion of the legal system, and the court of popular opinion hardly has the same evidentiary requirements as a court of law."

"Death is seldom so tangible as when you can see how alive a person once was."

"It's much easier to hide something when you give the impression of being transparent."

"Every time my views are questioned, I learn something new."

"People are prepared to put aside everything in the way of ethics and morals to protect their families."

"Lies, guilt, and secrets.  What family isn't built on such grounds?"

"And just as with life, the law has no regard for what ordinary people call justice."

"No failure in the world is comparable to being an inadequate parent."

 

Outlander ~ Diana Gabaldon

"...When you do tell me something, let it be the truth.  We have nothing now between us, save - respect, perhaps.  And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies."

​

" ...creatures have found that there is protection in numbers.  And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is what lies behind mob rule.  Because to step outside the group, let alone to stand against it was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature who dared it."

​

"Dangerous thing, infatuation."

"Bruised pride hurts worst than anything, and it bruises easy then."

"As though, knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary."

"....if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important."

"Was there a place where time no longer existed, or where it stopped?  A place where all things were possible.  And none were necessary."

"A good marriage is one of the most previous gifts from God."

"....loss is common to all men, and we are given means of overcoming it for our good."

​

Dragonfly in Amber ~ Diana Gabaldon

"The truth is always of use...It has the value of rarity."

"There are ways of killing other than with a knife or a gun, and there are things worse than physical death."

"Each one of us can be responsible only for his own actions and his own conscience."

"There is a saying, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

"When no one knows what to do, anyone with a sensible suggestion is going to be listened to."

"....People so often seemed not only willing but eager to believe the worst - and the worse, the better."

*READ page 716*

​

Voyager ~ Diana Gabaldon

"I think perhaps the greatest burden lies in caring for thoe we cannot help."

"And it's no use to shout at a stubborn man, or beat him, either; it only makes him more set on having his way."

"It's only that it's a good deal easier to do something that's a bit dangerous than it is to wait and worry while someone else does it."

"If I thought there was a choice...then I maybe couldna do it.  It's only when ye ken (know) ye can say no that it takes courage."

"....people will treat with disdain such phenomena as are proved by the evidence of the senses, and commonly experienced - while they will defend to the death the reality of a phenomenon which they have neither seen nor experienced."

 

Drums of Autum ~ Diana Gabaldon

"In all frankness, Mr. Fraser, there is the law, and then there is what's done."

"And what is not asked need not be told."

"We seek only justice, and that is not a quantity that can be obtained by violence, for where violence enters in, justice must surely flee."

"Disease, car wreck, random bullet.  There was no true refuge for anyone, but like most people, I managed not to think of that most of the time."

"I like baseball, I assured her.  Long stretches of boredom, punctuated by short periods of intense activity."

 

The Robber Bride ~ Margaret Atwood

"Pick any strand and snip, and history comes unraveled."

"Being white is getting more and more exhausting.  In her next life she's going to be a mixture, a blend, a vigorous hybrid...  Then no one will have anything on her."

"When you alter yourself, the alterations become the truth.  You are what they see."

"Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on."

"Winning intoxicates you and numbs you to the sufferings of others."

"The twins pay no attention to her because they assume she'll cover for them, lie herself blue, hurl her body in front of the bullets, and they're right, she will."

"It's astonishing what people will refuse to believe."

"People get a huge bang out of denunciation.  It makes them feel morally superior."

"Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause."

 

The Heart Goes Last ~ Margaret Atwood

"If prison isn't prison, the outside world has no meaning."

"The brain is very protective; it decides what we choose to remember."

"The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened.  It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread."

 

Terms of Endearment ~ Larry McMurtry

"There was never any peace with her mother around, but somehow, once he left, there was even less."

"As long as she could feel robbed of all choice, then nothing that went wrong could be her fault."

"None of us want a scene...but the fact is I have already made one.  I was brought up never to flinch from a scene when a scene is called for.  All that remains to be determined is the extent of the scene I shall make."

"Everyone likes to gripe about people who aren't there.  It doesn't mean one has no feeling, you know."

"Understanding is overrated and mystery is underrated.  Keep that in mind and you'll have a livelier life."

"Things that are truly wrong never get better.  They inevitably get worse.  The only way to stop anything is to stop at once."

​

Rules of Civility ~ Amor Towles

​

*Read all 110 "Rules" as set forth in 

The Young George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation

​

For many are called, but few are chosen.  Matthew 22:14

​

"Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you're proud of - because the world has every intention of using it against you."

"An act of generosity rarely ends a man's responsibilities toward another; it tends instead to begin them."

"How little imagination and courage we show in our hatreds."

"Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee."

"Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded."

"For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance, and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags, and haute cuisine)?" 

"As a quick aside, let me observe that in a moment of high emotion - whether they're triggered by anger, envy, humiliation or resentment - if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say."

"I guess there are two sides to every story.  And, as usual, they are both excuses." 

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The End of Men ~ Christina Sweeney-Baird

"Be wary of that little voice that tries to twist one scary thing into a spiral of despair."

"It would make me feel better in a strange way if someone from an official body came out and said,

"This is unheard of.  We have no idea what is going on."

"You always assume that the people in power will know what to do. 

Surely they've all got it figured out, but I don't think anyone knows what to do."

"What I do know, from years of reporting, is that ignorance, incompetence and fear so often go hand in hand with government that none of us should be surprised if the institution we thought would keep us safe would in fact be woefully inadequate in the face of a pandemic."

"Sometimes honesty can feel like betrayal." 

"...I realize that the only thing scarier than knowledge is the lack of it."

"A lot of people have forgotten just how vulnerable humans are."  Many things can kill a person."  People are becoming painfully aware of that fact now."

"I became obsessed with knowing how the plague had come to pass. 

I still don't understand how people aren't more gripped by the need to know why."

"In other words, tragedy doesn't immunize you against further tragedy."

"Bad things and good things can coexist."

"The idea of Theodore having been sat down by a teacher and taught how he should think about his future and relationships makes me feel a bit nauseous."

"Everything's sexism with you ladies."  

"Ah, the confidence of the mediocre white man."

"Maybe I have found out too late, that when you have someone to blame everything feels easier.  But what happens when you've held them responsible, and nothing's really changed?  What then?"

"To be so close to death and have life handed back to you is an amazing thing."

"Guess what, mental health also keeps people alive."

"Sometimes a cliche is a cliche for a reason."

"I love you so much and hate you at the same time.  That's marriage."

"You know, the world doesn't have to remember you for you to matter.  We were loved by those we loved.  Not everyone can say that."

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