Quotes from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity— one’s own and others’— but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“like an idiot pitching change into a well that nobody ever said was open for wishing.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then. Within”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s.” I”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“We’ve been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us? I”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“caelum, non animum mutant, for instance—climate may change, but not character—and”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“New things pop up at the edges, but the middle’s where the money is.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable. I”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Time only goes in that one direction.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“Maybe I’ll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C. That”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“this, they’ve never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don’t count anymore. I think it’s small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain. I”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“A woman can never be too rich or too thin or too young, truly.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.”
― Kathleen Rooney, quote from Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

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Popular quotes

“It is unrealistc to expect people to see you as you see yourself.”
― Epictetus, quote from The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness

“And so I began to read,' Sorkar said. 'And at first the complete works were like a jungle, the language was quicksand. Metaphors turned beneath my feet and became biting snakes, similes fled from my grasp like frightened deer, taking all meaning with them. All was alien, and amidst the hanging, entangling creepers of this foreign grammar, all sound became a cacophany. I feared for myself, for my health and sanity, but then I thought of my purpose, of where I was and who I was, of pain and I pressed on.”
― Vikram Chandra, quote from Red Earth and Pouring Rain

“The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten the danger. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from Holy the Firm

“Geist und Tat. Spirit and Action.”
― Susan Campbell Bartoletti, quote from The Boy Who Dared

“The constant steaming in of thoughts of others must suppress and confine our own and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought… The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui ( latin for vacuum suction )from the poverty of their own mind , which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others… It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves… When we read, another person thinks for us; merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anybody spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking. Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and very little experience , the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary”
― Will Durant, quote from The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

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