“I might be confused sometimes in my head but it is not something you need to talk about. Before you can talk you have to line it all up in order and I had rather just let it swirl around until I am too tired to think. You just let the motion in your head wear you out. Never think about it. You just make a bigger mess that way.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“Have you ever felt like you could cry because you know you just heard the most important thing anybody in the world could have spoke at that second?”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“I could lay here and read all night. I am not able to fall asleep without reading. You have the time when your brain has nothing to do so it rambles. I fool my brain out of that by making it read until it shuts off. I just think it is best to do something right up until you fall asleep.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“I could wake her up and ask have you ever been to the ocean? but I already know that answer. She has not. You can tell. It would humble you I whisper to her sleeping if you for one time stood by something stronger than yourself.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“You can rest with me until somebody comes to get you. We will not say anything. We can rest.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you started with one solitary season out of your life.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“Folks do not want to see a body disappear before their very eyes. Not me at least.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.
The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something's the matter with my daddy. When they come in the house I'm all in a state of shock and just don't know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over.
But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me out. I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead and everything. Next thing I know he's in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four.
All I did was wish him dead real hard every now and then. All I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
“Someone once told me that writing is an act of faith. Another person told me that forgiving is also an act of faith. That’s true. I think both heal, both are arts. What a fine thing it is to do both at once.”
― Kaye Gibbons, quote from Ellen Foster
Kaye Gibbons
Born place: in North Carolina, The United States
Born date January 1, 1960
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“I didn't leave right away. I stayed in the woods. I heard the faint voices of other people. I felt the cold against my skin. But mostly, I was aware of my own heavy breathing, my own thoughts, my own past, present, and future.
I realized then, and would have to keep realizing in all the years to come:
It didn't matter if I was the kind of girl who had sex, of the kind of girl who had her portrait on a wall in the library, or the kind of girl who got into the best college, or the kind of girl who didn't tell her parents everything, or the kind of girl who teachers loved.
I just needed to be okay with all the kinds of girl I was.”
― Siobhan Vivian, quote from Not That Kind of Girl
“Do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of texts, by logic, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think, ‘The ascetic is our teacher.’4 But when you know for yourselves, ‘These things are unwholesome; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them.”
― Bhikkhu Bodhi, quote from In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon
“Fortunately, getting hold of people’s garbage was a cinch. Indian detectives were much luckier than their counterparts in, say, America, who were forever rooting around in people’s dustbins down dark, seedy alleyways. In India, one could simply purchase an individual’s trash on the open market. All you had to do was befriend the right rag picker. Tens of thousands of untouchables of all ages still worked as unofficial dustmen and women across the country. Every morning, they came pushing their barrows, calling, “Kooray Wallah!” and took away all the household rubbish. In the colony’s open rubbish dump, surrounded by cows, goats, dogs and crows, they would sift through piles of stinking muck by hand, separating biodegradable waste from the plastic wrappers, aluminium foil, tin cans and glass bottles.”
― Tarquin Hall, quote from The Case of the Missing Servant
“I realized that sharing does not necessarily mean the giving of money or goods; there are times that the greatest gift is to set aside one’s own troubles and listen, to care about another’s heartache.”
― Jean Sasson, quote from Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
“You know what they say. If at first you don't succeed, try the same thing again. Sometimes the effort is called persistence and is the mark of a strong will. Sometimes it's called perseveration and is a sign of immaturity. For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behavior is called... policy.”
― Thomas King, quote from The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
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Emerald GreenBookQuoters 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.
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