Helen Hooven Santmyer · 1184 pages
Rating: (11.3K votes)
“In a way, looking back, it seemed a long, long time since she had been eighteen, but in another way her memories were so clear and vivid that it seemed like yesterday. Time was an accordion, all the air squeezed out of it as you grew old. And how strange that in your mind you did not feel any older. You were the same person, but where had the years gone?”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“But surely, if you trust God, you can believe the bad moments pass, and the good memories are worth enough.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“She was moved to a profound but pleasurable melancholy by the evidence that human life is brief and long survived by the material things it had believed itself to possess.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“But Calvinists have never been pacifists: they have always been all too ready for a fight.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“When we get presidents with brains it's purely by accident. Who was ever selected for his brains? We choose them for other qualities, or because they can be elected.”
― Helen Hooven Santmyer, quote from And Ladies of the Club
“played any sort of game. Ten.”
― Mary Balogh, quote from Slightly Dangerous
“She considered, maybe for the first time, how lucky she was to be able to pick up the phone and call her mother whenever she needed bad advice.”
― Brady Udall, quote from The Lonely Polygamist
“I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can’t be judged by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgements can make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only response to pain.
Perhaps most important, I learned that everyone has a story – of dreams and nightmares, hope and heartache, love and loss, courage and fear, sacrifice and selfishness. All my life I’ve been interested in other people’s stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them. When I grew up into politics, I always felt the main point of my work was to people a chance to have better stories. - Page 15, Paragraph 5, ‘My Life’ by Bill Clinton. –Hard cover version-”
― Bill Clinton, quote from My Life
“It was not any one thing that scared him. It was everything. It was his life. His life terrified him. He didn't see how he was going to get through the rest of it.”
― Harry Crews, quote from A Feast of Snakes
“In Nature too, much may exist that we do not like. But we cannot change the essential character of natural events. If, for example, someone thinks — and there are some who have maintained as much — that the way in which man ingests his food, digests it, and incorporates it into his body is disgusting, one cannot argue the point with him. One must say to him: There is only this way or starvation.”
― Ludwig von Mises, quote from Liberalism: The Classical Tradition
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