My Year With Eleanor Quotes

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I grew up in a relatively small town...Cruising up and down the main street in a car, going to the mall and attending drunken date-rape festivals called "parties" were the culmination of social interaction.
I was never entirely comfortable in this setting.
Until I was eighteen and left 'home," I was constantly at odds with this culture I grew up in. The older I got, the more clearly I saw what was supposed to be looming ahead for me as a woman.
This conflict became increasingly unsettling with each passing year. I did not want to keep my mouth shut and act ladylike...or respect the idea that all of my teachers were smarter than me. Dealing with such opposition on a day-to-day basis disrupted the momentum of womanpower I was born with. I struggled to keep my power somewhat apace with my life. This proved difficult, as I expended a large amount of energy defending my own concept of the woman I wanted to be. Furthermore, deprived of the experience I needed in order to know exactly what "the woman I wanted to be" meant, things were not only difficult, but mind-bogglingly complex as well. ~ Inga Muscio

Although, fanciful's origin circa 1627 made me still love the word, even if I'd ruined its applicability to my connection with Snarl. (I mean DASH!) Like, I could totally see Mrs. Mary Poppencock returning home to her cobblestone hut with the thatched roof in Thamesburyshire, Jolly Olde England, and saying to her husband, "Good sir Bruce, would it not be wonderful to have a roof that doesn't leak when it rains on our green shires, and stuff?" And Sir Bruce Poppencock would have been like, "I say, missus, you're very fanciful with your ideas today." To which Mrs. P. responded, "Why, Master P., you've made up a word! What year is it? I do believe it's circa 1627! Let's carve the year
we think
on a stone so no one forgets. Fanciful! Dear man, you are a genius. I'm so glad my father forced me to marry you and allow you to impregnate me every year. ~ Rachel Cohn

Do you love him?"
I jumped out of my skin. She was standing right beside me. "Who?"
Her eyes widened.
"Seth?" I peered over my shoulder at his retreating back. "Um, we've been going together for a long time. A year."
"That's not what I asked."
I couldn't look at her. Couldn't risk her seeing through me, reading me.
"Do you hear bells?" she asked.
I had to smile at that. "Bells?"
"You know, bells. Music, fireworks." She wiggled her eyebrows.
I let out a short laugh. It sounded strangled, same way I felt. "Only in my dreams."
"Oh, yeah?" She arched an eyebrow.
Why did I say that? God.
Cece said softly, "Maybe you should listen to your dreams."
My stomach suffered a major eruption.
She pushed off the locker she'd been balancing against with the sole of her shoe and said, "Think about it."
Like I haven't been. "Do you think about it?" I asked at her back.
She stopped and turned around. "I don't have to. I know." (Chapter13) ~ Julie Anne Peters

Arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding a half-pint champagne bottle (medical comforts) with the candle stuck in it. To my question he said Mr. Kurtz had painted this - in this very station more than a year ago - while waiting for means to go to his trading-post. 'Tell me, pray,' said I, 'who is this Mr. Kurtz? ~ Joseph Conrad

It's hard to talk about guns without sounding defensive or blustery. I'm pro-gun the same way I'm pro-potato fork. I use them both to gather food for the year, with the caveat that if you break into my house, I won't be waiting for yo at the top of the stairs with a potato fork. ~ Michael Perry

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She'd set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I'd begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin.
He slid it across the counter to me - Don't worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change. ~ Laura Anderson Kurk

As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Siri ~ Michel Houellebecq

My daughter Karen was born in 1958, the year my first Paddington book came out, so she grew up with him. ~ Michael Bond

We were at a swap meet in Cochituate last year, and there was this Boy Scout troop with a sign that read, 'Help Boy Scouts, Blind Kids.' Toby saw it, and he grabbed my shirt collar and pulled me away. I asked what was wrong, and with this scared expression on his face, he said, That's not right. They need to be stopped.'
I cracked up. 'Oh, no,' I said.
'When I asked him why helping blind kids and Boy Scouts was bad, Toby's whole face went white. He said, 'Forget it. Let's go.' But I had to know what the hell he was talking about, so I made him walk back over with me. We looked at the sign together, and finally he mumbled, 'I didn't see the comma. ~ Bill Konigsberg

That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children - fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

What if I took the picture books that my grandmother made and snapped open the rings in every binder, let the plastic pages spill out onto the floor, and then attacked them with my scissors?

Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch beer from a tinted brown glass, I reestablished my relationships with the members of my family. This is where I put it all together and perpetuated the lies. Not malicious lies, but lies with so many years to develop that we forgot the truth because nobody rehearsed it. When Mark was sentence to sixty days in a twelve-step rehab program in 1991, he wrote an inventory of his experiences with drugs and alcohol that filled a whole notebook, and then he gave it to us to read, It was in those pages that I learned he had once tapped the powder out of horse tranquilizer capsules, melted it down, and shot it into his veins for a high that lasted fourteen days. My God, I thought, Oh my God. This is Mark's story? Okay, now put the cooked-down shot-up horse tranquilizer against the pictures in the album. What do you get? Collage. Dry made wet and introduced into the body. Cut cut cut. It's not so radical. ~ Jill Christman

There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year's Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte's should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though[…]"it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year's Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind ~ Marcel Proust

She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn't socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger [ ... ] their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I'd forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; they freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless. For all I had in common with any of them, I might as well have tried to go down and hang out with the eight year olds at PS 41. ~ Donna Tartt

Mine is the time of foliage,
When hills and valleys teem
With buds and vines sweet scented,
All clothed in glowing green.

My nights are bright and starry,
My days are long and clear
And truly I'm the fairest,
Of all months in the year. ~ Mary Weston Fordham

Listen to me," Jordan begged urgently, somehow convinced that she would stay alive if she understood how much she meant to him. "Listen to what my life was like before you hurtled into it wearing that suit of armor - Life was empty. Colorless. And then you happened to me, and suddenly I felt feelings I never believed existed, and I saw things I'd never seen before. You don't believe that, do you, darling? But it's true, and I can prove it." His deep voice ragged with unshed tears, Jordan recited his proof: "The flowers in the meadow are blue," he told her brokenly. "The ones by the stream are white. And on the arch, by the arbor, the roses are red."

Lifting her hand to his face, he rubbed his cheek against it. "And that's not all I noticed. I noticed that the clearing by the pavilion - the one where my plaque is - looks like the very same one where we had our duel a year ago. Oh, and darling, there's something else I have to tell you: I love you, Alexandra."

Tears choked his voice and made it a tormented whisper. "I love you, and if you die I'll never be able to tell you that. ~ Judith McNaught

This year, I'm most thankful for the people around me who've supported me-my friends, and my family and boyfriend. It's been a really crazy year. There have been a lot of changes with moving to America and a lot of adjustments for my family and friends in Australia to let me go off on this journey and miss me a lot. I miss them a lot, but am so grateful for them. ~ Lucy Fry

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life. ~ Garth Greenwell

Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches, when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to do things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra's vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father's life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. ~ Harper Lee

Well, The Year Is Finally Wrapped up, Looking Back, I Made Mistakes Along Just like The Next Man, As a Matter of Fact, I Have Wronged, Disappointed, Been Inpatient a Little Insecure, Been Out of Control and at Times Hard to Bare With.
My Prayer Dear Family and Friend is That You Forgive Me and Continue to Bare With Me as I Look Upon Myself and Work on Myself on The Next Coming Years, I Haven't Been The Best of Friends But Sure I Will As I Continue To Seek God's Enlightenment and Wisdom. I Love You All and Bless You In God's Name. ~ William Nsubuga

Psychologist Carl Jung, in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, wrote, "About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time."3 Jung wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, but with every passing year and decade their truth has become even more glaring. Holocaust ~ David Jeremiah

Bruce is still my friend. We don't talk much. We don't have to. He is great and in his own league. I'm not him and he is not me. But we are on similar paths, writing and singing out own kind of songs around the world, along with Bob and a few other singer/songwriters. It is a a silent fraternity of sorts, occupying this space in people's souls with our music. Last year, I lost my right-hand man, the pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith. This year Bruce lost his right-hand man, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons. It's time for another talk; friends can help each other just by being there. Now both of us will look to our right and see a giant hole, a memory, the past and the future. I won't play with another steel player trying to recreate Ben's parts, and I know Bruce won't play with another sax man trying to play Clarence's. Those parts are not going to happen again. They already did. That takes a lot out of our repertoires. ~ Neil Young

I remember my first year, I hit him with three good punches and couldn't believe he was still standing. He hit me with one and cracked my helmet. My head hurt for a week. ~ Georges Laraque

Tag said I was aptly named. "Wasn't Moses a prophet or something?"
I just rolled my eyes. At least we weren't talking about the fact that I'd been found in a basket.
"MO-SES!" Tag said my name in a deep, echoing "God voice," reminiscent of the old Charlton Heston movie, The Ten Commandments. Gigi had loved Charlton Heston. I'd spent an Easter with her the year I was twelve and we'd had a Charlton Heston marathon that made me want to smear red paint above everybody's door and burn all the bushes in Levan. Come to think of it, I had smeared paint all over Levan, many times. It was all Charlton Heston's fault. ~ Amy Harmon

I majored in religion for my entire undergraduate career at Duke University and then I went to seminary for a year unsure whether or not I really had the call to be a minister. I spoke with a pastor of my home church and told him I was going to seminary. He said "Do you feel the call to be a minister?" and I said "Honestly, I don't. I know it's the greatest call you could have but I'm not feeling that call myself. He said "Well, you know, you're wrong. It's not the greatest call. The greatest call is whatever calling God has for you." ~ Randall Wallace

Matt laughed. "Close. That was last year. This year it's Obsessive Deovtion to Fourier Analysis Theory and Applications. And my personal favorite, Quantum Physics II: Romantic Entanglements of Energy and Matter."
Julie turned her head to Matt. "You're a double major? Physics and math? Jesus ... "
"I know. Nerdy." He shrugged.
"No, I'm impressed. I'm just surprised your brains fit in your head."
"I was fitted with a specially desinged compression filter that allows excessive information to lie dormant until I need to access it. It's only the Beta version, so excuse any kinks that may appear. I really can't be held responsible. ~ Jessica Park

My darling Julie, I know you'll never see this letter, but it helps to write to you every day. It keeps you close to me. G-d, I miss you so. You haunt every hour of my life. I wish I'd never met you. No-I don't mean that! What good would my life be without my memories of you to make me smile.

I keep wondering if you're happy. I want you to be. I want you to have a glorious life. That's why I couldn't say the things I knew you wanted to hear when we were together. I was afraid if I did, you'd wait for me for years. I knew you wanted me to say I loved you. Not saying that to you was the only unselfish thing I did in Colorado, and I now I regret even that.

I love you, Julie. Christ, I love you so much. I'd give up all my life to have one year with you. Six months. Three. Anything.

You stole my heart in just a few days, darling, but you gave me your heart, too. I know you did- I could see it in your eyes every time you looked at me.

I don't regret the loss of my freedom any more or rage at the injustice of the years I spent in prison. Now, my only regret is that I can't have you. You're young, and I know you'll forget about me quickly and go on with your own life. That's exactly what you should do. It's what you must do. I want you to do that, Julie.

That's such a lousy lie. What I really want is to see you again, to hold you in my arms, to make love to you over and over again until I've filled you so completely that ther ~ Judith McNaught

voice bringing my defenses down. I'd never have expected it a year ago, but now . . . after seeing him lose everything to follow his heart, I could. I could accept his comfort, show my vulnerability - even if it might not last. The undeniable truth was, he was meant for better things than me. One day Ellasbeth would have him, and I'd be left with the memory of who he had wanted to be. "Rachel?" But I'd be damned if I didn't take what I could of the time we had. Catching my tears, I wiped my face, giving Trent a thankful smile as I pulled back and looked for Bis. The little gargoyle had his wings draped around him, looking like a devil himself. "Bis? Can you jump her to Trent's? ~ Kim Harrison

Oh my God, my six-year-old has you believing in ghosts now?"
Logan shrugged. "She just...makes some good points."
"Such as?" Dana had honestly not talked about the ghosts that much with Grace. She'd just rolled with the subject, just like she would any other topic. It was something that came up once in a while--like every night at bedtime when the globe need moved--but otherwise Dana didn't dwell on it or make a big deal of it.
"Well, why would someone leave a place they were happy if they didn't have to?" Logan said. "If someone is a spirit and they can hang around someplace, maybe sometimes they choose to do that. ~ Erin Nicholas

Pudge/Colonel:
"I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself.

But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss,

I guess. And I had this secret.
You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how

I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide.

She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would ~ John Green

Here's some advice. Stay alive, says Haymitch, and then bursts out laughing. I exchange a look with Peeta before I remember that I'm having nothing more to do with him. I'm surprised to see the hardness in his eyes. He generally seems so mild.
'That's very funny,' says Peeta. Suddenly, he lashes out at the glass in Haymitch's hand. It shatters on the floor, sending the bloodred liquid running toward the back of the train. 'Only not to us.'
Haymitch considers this a moment, then punches Peeta in the jaw, knocking him from his chair. When he turns back to reach for the spirits, I drive my knife into the table between his hand and the bottle, barely missing his fingers. I brace myself to deflect his hit, but it doesn't come. Instead, he sits back and squints at us.
'Well, what's this?' says Haymitch. 'Did I actually get a pair of fighters this year? ~ Suzanne Collins

I had a great deal of independence from the president and the White House during the entirety of my five years. And I'm not sure exactly what that is, but our friend, Walter Dellinger, has a theory about it, and I think he's probably right. And the theory starts with the fact that I worked in the White House for a year and a half before coming over to the position of SG. And because of that, when I was nominated, there was some chatter out there that, "Oh. They're putting a political hack in. This has never happened before." ~ Donald Verrilli Jr.

Sal and Henry return with a gust of warm garden air and I settle down to create miniature roses from sugarpaste using tiny ivory spatulas and crimpers. I will have no antique tester bed crowning my cake, only a posy of flowers: symbols of beauty and growth, each year new-blossoming. I let Henry paint the broken pieces with spinach juice, while I tint my flowers with cochineal and yellow gum. As a pretty device I paint a ladybird on a rose, and think it finer than Sèvres porcelain.
At ten o'clock tomorrow, I will marry John Francis at St. Mark's Church, across the square. As Sal and I rehearse our plans for the day, pleasurable anticipation bubbles inside me like fizzing wine. We will return from church for this bride cake in the parlor, then take a simple wedding breakfast of hot buttered rolls, ham, cold chicken, and fruit, on the silver in the dining room. Nan has sent me a Yorkshire Game Pie, so crusted with wedding figures of wheatsheafs and blossoms it truly looks too good to eat. We have invited few guests, for I want no great show, and instead will have bread and beef sent to feed the poor. And at two o'clock, we will leave with Henry for a much anticipated holiday by the sea, at Sandhills, on the southern coast. John Francis has promised Henry he might try sea-bathing, while I have bought stocks of cerulean blue and burnt umber to attempt to catch the sea and sky in watercolor. ~ Martine Bailey

The following spring was a time of calving. Great icebergs calved from the vast glaciers which stretched down to our fjords from distant mountains. The heifers and cows of Kaupangen gave birth to over one hundred calves that spring. Most survived. Gudrod, the master shepherd, had seventy-five new lambkins skipping after their mothers. Ten sets of lamb twins were born in the city that year. Bitches had pups suckling at their breasts. The mountain goats that stood watch over the fjord, indifferently chewing on the wild grasses between the rocks, had kids following them on their steep paths. The residents of the city, too, gave birth. Twenty-one new healthy babies were born within thirty days of the spring equinox; boys and girls with thick blonde, brown, black, or red hair; others with smooth bald heads. Olaf, my third father, my king, had a son, stillborn. Olaf wept. Kenna wept. I wept as the boy was buried inside the casket with his mother in our graveyard by the church. ~ Jason Born

I'm just like any other regular mum; cooking, cleaning, wiping butts, picking up after kids, being a wife and helping the kids with their homework. Mind you, I'm terrible at maths. I can't even do my six-year-old's maths homework with her. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow

My life felt heavy that night, with each year of my life like a weighty crate, so I had almost thirteen crates to carry around inside me, with each crate full of notebooks and each notebook full of secrets. It is hard to lug such a heavy load around with me and to keep everyone from seeing it. But some secrets are so strange and so dangerous that showing them to people makes the strangeness and the danger pour into their lives like dark, dark ink. I lived with this ink myself, emblazoned on my ankle for me to see each morning when I got out of bed, except for the days when I collapsed exhausted with my shoes on. But I did not want to stain anyone else's life. ~ Lemony Snicket

My heart slammed into my ribs and then my eyes closed automatically as his lips brushed mine just once. Every nerve ending in my body was alight with electricity at our connection. He clutched me close against his chest in a quick embrace. "Happy New Year," he murmured, his breath tickling close against my ear, sending shivers down my spine. ~ Lisa Suzanne

I think that distributors and marketing companies realise that there are a huge number of women over 40 who want to go the cinema and see films about themselves. Women of my age don't want to be force-fed with stuff about 25-year-olds. ~ Lesley Manville

I remember being in a comic shop with my son, with my ten year-old son and he put his hand over my eyes. He was embarrassed about me seeing the comics at Forbidden Planet. ~ Francoise Mouly

I live in a high rise with my family part of the year in New York and I don't know three quarters of the people in the building. We live in the same square-footage and I wouldn't know who they were. ~ Dan Aykroyd

I stayed at home because I prefer to be in my own room, with my own family, or in my garden - which is lovely this year…

(Felix Mendelssohn, in a letter to Ignaz Moscheles, 1832) ~ Felix Mendelssohn

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