“I was perhaps as intensely naïve to think I could get a job working with the Yankees. But the lesson to me is that with a great deal of persistence and a little bit of common sense, even if the thing you’re chasing may not exist, you can sometimes will it into being.”
― quote from The Moth
“that when we can celebrate and truly own what it is that makes us different, we’re able to find the source of our greatest creative power.”
― quote from The Moth
“There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish Room. They were both named Inez. And on that day Big Inez gave Little Inez a plantation all her own. Two thousand acres. Then her little sister came running in and said, “Grandmother, can I have a plantation too?” And Big Inez looked down and said, “Child, your name is Alice. You were named for your Yankee grandmother. Go ask your Yankee grandmother for a plantation.”
― quote from The Moth
“The great storyteller Frank O’Connor defined it best, saying once that every good story should end, in spirit, with the exact same words: “And everything that ever happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.”
― quote from The Moth
“Orwell’s famous lesson, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
― quote from The Moth
“How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.”
― quote from The Moth
“I’m so fucking pissed that I was born in Cali. I’d clean up if I said ‘y’all’ and ‘fixin’ every other word,” Jake complained.”
― Tillie Cole, quote from Sweet Soul
“One night, as I cooked dinner in our home on the zoo grounds, I brooded over my troubles. I didn’t want to spend the evening feeling sorry for myself, so I thought about Steve out in the back, fire-gazing. He was a very lucky man, because for Steve, fire-gazing literally meant getting to build a roaring fire and sitting beside it, to contemplate life.
Suddenly I heard him come thundering up the front stairs. He burst wild-eyed into the kitchen. He’s been nailed by a snake, I thought immediately. I didn’t know what was going on.
“I know what we have to do!” he said, extremely excited.
He pulled me into the living room, sat me down, and took my hands in his. Looking intensely into my eyes, he said, “Babe, we’ve got to have children.”
Wow, I thought, that must have been some fire.
“Ok-aaay,” I said.
“You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” he said, trying to catch me up to his thoughts. “Everything we’ve been working for, the zoo that we’ve been building up, all of our efforts to protect wildlife, it will all stop with us!”
As with every good idea that came into his head, Steve wanted to act on it immediately. Just take it in stride, I said to myself. But he was so sincere. We’d talked about having children before, but for some reason it hit him that the time was now.
“We have got to have children,” he said. “I know that if we have kids, they will carry on when we’re gone.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s get right on that.”
Steve kept pacing around the living room, talking about all the advantages of having kids--how I’d been so passionate about carrying on with the family business back in Oregon, and how he felt the same way about the zoo. He just knew our kids would feel the same too.
I said, “You know, there’s no guarantee that we won’t have a son who grows up to be a shoe salesman in Malaysia.”
“Come off the grass,” Steve said. “Any kid of ours is going to be a wildlife warrior.”
I thought of the whale calves following their mamas below the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight and prepared myself for a new adventure with Steve, maybe the greatest adventure of all.”
― Terri Irwin, quote from Steve & Me
“I had no shoes, and I felt sorry for myself until I met a man who had no feet. I took his shoes. Now I feel better.”
― George Carlin, quote from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
“At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.”
― Shirley Hazzard, quote from The Transit of Venus
“The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.”
― André Gide, quote from The Immoralist
BookQuoters 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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