“There’s a Greek legend—no, it’s in something Plato wrote—about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That’s why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“The thing about mountains is that you have to keep on climbing them, and that it's always hard, but there's a view from top every time when you finally get there.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“The 1st day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to do that forever.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“I went downstairs to Dad’s encyclopedia and looked up HOMOSEXUALITY, but that didn’t tell me much about any of the things I felt. What struck me most, though, was that, in the whole long article, the word “love” wasn’t used even once. That made me mad; it was as if whoever wrote the article didn’t know that gay people actually love each other. The encyclopedia writers ought to talk to me, I thought as I went back to bed; I could tell them something about love.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Don't let ignorance win. Let love.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Don't punish yourselves for people's ignorant reactions to what we all are. Don't let ignorance win. Let love.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“It's Annie and me they're all sitting around here like cardboard people judging; It's Annie and me. And what we did that they think is wrong, when you pare it all down, was fall in love.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“But what really is immorality? And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“And Annie showed me how ailanthus trees grow under subway and sewer gratings, stretching toward the sun, making shelter in the summer, she said, laughing, for the small dragons that live under the streets.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“The first day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to be able to do that forever: stand in kitchens watching Annie feed cats. Our kitchens. Our cats.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Liza-don't let it make any difference. It won't, will it? With us, I mean."
"Of course it won't," I told her.
But I was wrong. Six months of not writing-that's a difference.
And so I lied to Annie. On top of everything else, I lied to Annie, too.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Ugh! Young girls, they should laugh. Life's bad enough when you're grown, you might as well laugh when you're young.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“I am happy, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I'm happy with Annie; she and my work are all I'll ever need; she's happy, too-we both were till this happened...”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“It was like a war inside me; I couldn’t even recognize all the sides. There was one that said, ‘No, this is wrong; you know it’s wrong and bad and sinful,’ and there was another that said, ‘Nothing has ever felt so right and natural and true and good,’ and another that said it was happening too fast, and another that just wanted to stop thinking altogether and fling my arms around Annie and hold her forever. There were other sides, too, but I couldn’t sort them out.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“And that's like my world." Annie pointed up to the stars again."Inaccecible.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“And that's like my world." Annie pointed up to the stars again. "Inaccessible."
"Not," I said to her softly, "to unicorns. Nothing's inaccessible to unicorns. Not even--not even white birds.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Don't let ignorance win', said Ms. Stevenson. 'Let love.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins? I think it was Sunday when that feeling began.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“It felt a little as if we'd found a script that had been written just for us, and we were reading through the beginning quickly [...] hurrying so we could get to the part that mattered, whatever that was to be.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“Chad kept kidding me that I was in love, and asking with whom, and then Sally and Walt did, too, and after a while I didn’t even mind, because even if they had the wrong idea about it, they were right. Soon it wasn’t hard any more to say it—to myself, I mean, as well as over and over again to Annie—and to accept her saying it to me.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
Nancy Garden
Born place: in Boston, The United States
Born date May 15, 1938
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“After turning it in her mind for some time, she came to the conclusion, that she had been taking part in a great drama, which was, in itself, but one great system of robbery and wrong. 'Yes,' she said, 'the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.' True, she had not received labor from others, and stinted their pay, as she felt had been practised against her; but she had taken their work from them, which was their only means to get money, and was the same to them in the end. For instance–a gentleman where she lived would give her a dollar to hire a poor man to clear the new-fallen snow from the steps and side-walks. She would arise early, and perform the labor herself, putting the money into her own pocket. A poor man would come along, saying she ought to have let him have the job; he was poor, and needed the pay for his family. She would harden her heart against him, and answer–'I am poor too, and I need it for mine.' But, in her retrospection, she thought of all the misery she might have been adding to, in her selfish grasping, and it troubled her conscience sorely; and this insensibility to the claims of human brotherhood, and the wants of the destitute and wretched poor, she now saw, as she never had done before, to be unfeeling, selfish and wicked.”
― Sojourner Truth, quote from Narrative of Sojourner Truth
“No offense intended to the satanists who might be reading this, but I have found that those who worship the devil tend to be sneaky, more deceitful by far than your average Methodist—and proud of it.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Saint Odd
“The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.”
― quote from Nemesis Games
“But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. That ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others. In Beyonce's song "Irreplaceable," she rhymes "minute" with "minute," and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point I'm singing along). On my own song "Astronaut," I wrap up with the line "feel like I'm an astronaut," which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works
“It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Men Explain Things to Me
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