Kathleen Rooney · 287 pages
Rating: (9.5K votes)
“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
Kathleen Rooney
Born place: Beckley, West Virginia, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“She had read articles over the years about a man's supposed biological craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe. ... She thought of a line from Nabokov: "Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage - not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren't pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn't Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Guest Room
“And as she leaned down to drink, the lock of hair fell from her bosom, and floated away with the water. Now she was so frightened that she did not see it; but her maid saw it, and was very glad, for she knew the charm; and she saw that the poor bride would be in her power, now that she had lost the hair. So when the bride had done drinking, and would have got upon Falada again, the maid said, 'I shall ride upon Falada, and you may have my horse instead'; so she was forced to give up her horse, and soon afterwards to take off her royal clothes and put on her maid's shabby ones.”
― Jacob Grimm, quote from Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales
“Meanwhile she's coldly interrogating me with her eyes. She's definitely in charge of this house and this moment. This must be Chloe.
She escorts me to a table full of people and presents me. She introduces them briefly. This one's from Morocco, that one from Italy, he's Persian--I'm not exactly sure what that means--this one's from "the UK." They're all in their twenties, poised and dismissive. They don't know or care who I'm supposed to be at home or where I went to school. They're measuring something else I can't see and don't understand.
They nod and turn back to each other. They seem to be waiting for a cue from Chloe to release them from having to feign interest. She introduces herself at substantially more length. Her father is Chinese and her mother is Swiss; she grew up in Hong Kong and "in Europe."
I grew up in Michigan and in Michigan. But she didn't ask.”
― quote from Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone
“But fathers are soft on daughters. Look how Dad favors Angela. He gave her ten times more. Because she reminded him of Mae West. He was always smiling at her boobs. He wasn't aware of it. Mother and I saw it.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Mr. Sammler's Planet
“By all means, marry, I told him. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. Myrddin”
― Jeff Wheeler, quote from The Hollow Crown
In Our Time
The Crown Tower
A Dance to the Music...
The Boleyn Inheritan...
The True Story of Ha...
JulianBookQuoters 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.
