Anita > Anita's Quotes

“The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.”
― Elena Ferrante

“She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“The waves rolled in like blue metal tubes carrying an egg white of foam on their peaks, then broke in a thousand glittering splinters and came up to the street with an oh of wonder and fear from those watching.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“Thus she returned to the theme of ‘before,’ but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino… <…> They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation … And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“I reshuffled the cards that by now we knew well enough. I spoke of the before and the after, of the old generation and of ours, of how we were different, of how she and Stefano were different. And this last argument made a breach, seduced her, I returned to it passionately. She listened to me in silence, evidently she wanted to be helped to compose herself, and slowly she did.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“It was predictable, of course, but now that a date had been fixed, March 12th, it was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”
― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

“I’ve come to understand that there’s a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It’s hard to say good- bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.”
― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace

“Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do[.]”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“... not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“It’s hard to help those who don’t want to help themselves.”

“Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others,” Elsa objects.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“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 was how oppression works.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“But, you know, do what you like! Have a million books! I was only, like, asking. It’s still a book if you’re reading it on an iPad. Soup is soup whatever bowl it’s in.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“They construct words of forgiveness from the ruins of fighting words.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“You can’t kill a nightmare, but you can scare it. And there’s nothing so feared by nightmares as milk and cookies.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Sometimes I think I'd like someone to kill him."
Alf doesn't answer. Elsa looks at the hammer.
"I mean... sort of kill, anyway. I know one shouldn't think people deserve to die. But sometimes I'm not sure people like him deserve to live..."
Alf leans against the balcony railing.
"It's human."
"Is it human to want people to die?"
Alf shakes his head calmly.
"It's human not to be sure.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln