Carol Plum-Ucci · 336 pages
Rating: (3.3K votes)
“Complete happiness can look so much like complete terror that its hard to tell them apart.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“If you can understand human behavior, it can’t hurt you nearly as much.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“You're supposed to be kind to everyone, because you never know when you're meeting an angel.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“There are times in life to grow, and there are times in life to shine. One can't grow and shine at the same time; it just doesn't work that way. Now you're growing. Tomorrow you'll shine.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“He says you don't often find angels in places like happy homes and rich people's backyard parties. He says that angels flock to places like hospitals and homelss shelters and jails, because those people realize they need help. And do they are able to believe in strange phenomena. Funny how the world is backward. The really comfortable people don't always see much supernaturally, and to the ones who have to struggle, it's, like, breathing in their faces. The first are last... and the last are first.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“If people knew who the angels were, they would be very nice when they saw one and would still do their same evil garbage when they thought none were around. Knowing who they are defeats the purpose.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“If a life goes down the toilet, it comes out in a river and meets the sea.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“Don't you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth. Any more than it's going to topple a skyscraper. There's truth, and there's belief. Don't call a mule a stallion.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“You gotta pay your dues to sing the blues.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“I don’t really think our greatest memories are always great while they’re happening.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“Sometimes it has to feel worse before it feels better.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“Don't tell people you care about them when all you really care about is getting your own way.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“Some doctors say a person who has only had same-sex attractions is, like, a zero. A person who has only had opposite-sex attractions is, like, a ten. He says most people fall between one and nine.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“Of all those books you've read? There's got to be something, somewhere in them, to help us laugh at a situation like this.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“Problem with the big philosophers is they cared about ideas more than people. Hegel would probably have stepped over a guy trying to slit his wrists outside a bar — to get to all the people he could sit and bullshit with inside. Did you know half of philosophy was first put into words by people shot in the ass?”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“People create their own little hells. They don’t need my help”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“My mom always said that people admire you for your strengths, but they love you for your faults. They love you for all your imperfections, which make them more comfortable with their own imperfect lives.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“The deep doesn't bother swallowing just anybody. The sea takes the extraordinary and leaves the rest be”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“World is all backward… It’s like…we’re through the looking glass. Good is bad, bad is good. Black is white, white is black. People base their lives on convenient recollections and are considered sane. People who look too hard for truth are considered crazy.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“There is truth. There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn’t going to change the truth.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“The truth will set you free, and then you shall be free indeed.”
― Carol Plum-Ucci, quote from What Happened to Lani Garver
“The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.
True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:
You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.
(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received 'tenners,' the longest term then given.
(In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the 'nuns.' Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three-year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1
“When both men had their shirt off, as they did right now, it was like living in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad- a six-pack celebration, complete with triceps and biceps galore.
No doubt about it, Dolphina loved her new job.”
― Suzanne Brockmann, quote from All Through the Night
“The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. A traveler journeys along a fine road. It has been strewn with traps. He falls into one. Do you say it is the traveler’s fault, or that of the scoundrel who lays the traps?”
― Marquis de Sade, quote from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
“And if he had lived, he would have been tall and strong, weak and wise. He would have needed me, and he would have pushed me away.”
― Anne Frasier, quote from Hush
“For Robert the experience was another step in education. He was learning in particular that patriotic declarations did not make due process of law superfluous and that he owed a debt to his own inner standards.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from Robert Kennedy and His Times
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