Quotes from A Woman of the Iron People

424 pages

Rating: (328 votes)


“I am the Little Bug Spirit. I come to people when they begin to take themselves too seriously. They think they are big. I cut them down to size." This angered me. I tried to speak, but I couldn't get my thoughts together. The person went on, “I am the stone under your foot. I am the bug that bites you in the ass. I am the fart that comes when you are introduced to the important visiting professor. I am menstrual cramps and diarrhea." I kept getting angrier. “My tools are lies and tricks, misunderstandings and accidents. Everything stupid and undignified happens because of me. Hola! I am something!”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People


“I am the Little Bug Spirit. I come to people when they begin to take themselves too seriously. They think they are big. I cut them down to size.”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People


“Knowledge—by itself—is an intervention. Our presence changes the way the natives see the world. According to her, there is no way to study these people without causing change." “The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People


“What had they been thinking of, those people then? They had left their descendants almost no water and great mountains of uranium. What kind of inheritance was that? How did they think we were going to survive?”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People


“It's a typical Western bias. You think a tool is more important than a dream because a tool can be measured and a dream cannot.”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People



Popular quotes

“He’s thinking, which is always a good sign.”
― Portia Moore, quote from If I Break


“Again Serena’s frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you. To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background. “Aren’t you the one that screwed me over last time here?” she asks umpire Asderaki. “Yeah, you are. Don’t look at me. Really, don’t even look at me. Don’t look my way. Don’t look my way,” she repeats, because it is that simple.”
― Claudia Rankine, quote from Citizen: An American Lyric


“God is one answer to our need to explain ourselves, to make sense of ourselves. But the moment you just accept yourself, then no explanation is needed, and god is everything together and nothing in particular.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements


“It seems those most likely to miss God’s work in the world are those most convinced they know exactly what to look for, the ones who expect God to play by the rules.”
― Rachel Held Evans, quote from Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church


“You'll make mistakes because it's impossible to know what is or isn't a mistake until it's made.”
― Stephenie Meyer, quote from The Chemist


Interesting books

Hard as It Gets
(15.6K)
Hard as It Gets
by Laura Kaye
Ramona
(1.5K)
Ramona
by Helen Hunt Jackson
Against All Odds
(2.5K)
Against All Odds
by Angie McKeon
Dark Tide
(3.7K)
Dark Tide
by Jennifer Donnelly
Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games
(3.3K)
The Marriage of Opposites
(40.4K)
The Marriage of Oppo...
by Alice Hoffman

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.