Iva > Iva's Quotes

“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.”
― Shel Silverstein

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
"Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“Always face what you fear. Have just enough money, never too much, and some string. Even if it’s not your fault, it’s your responsibility. Witches deal with things. Never stand between two mirrors. Never cackle. Do what you must do. Never lie, but you don’t always have to be honest. Never wish. Especially don’t wish upon a star, which is astronomically stupid. Open your eyes, and then open your eyes again.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“I'll never be like this again . . . I'll never again feel as tall as the sky and as old as the hills and as strong as the sea. I've been given something for a while, and the price of it is that I have to give it back.

And the reward is giving it back, too. No human could live like this. You could spend a day looking at a flower to see how wonderful it is, and that wouldn't get the milking done. No wonder we dream our way through our lives. To be awake, and see it all as it really is...no one could stand that for long.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“How big is the world when you’re twelve years old? Both infinite and infinitesimal. It’s all your wildest dreams, but it’s also a cramped locker room in an ice rink.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“So let’s review all the ways the Dorito Effect appears to be turning us into nutritional idiots:

• Dilution. As real food becomes bland and loses its capacity to please us, we are less inclined to eat it and very often enhance it in ways that further blunt its nutrition.

• Nutritional decapitation. When we take flavors from nature, we capture the experience of food but leave the nutrition—the fiber, the vitamins, the minerals, the antioxidants, the plant secondary compounds—behind. In nature, flavor compounds always appear in a nutritional context.

• False variety. We naturally crave variety in food—it’s one of nature’s ways of making sure we get a diverse diet. Fake flavors make foods that are nutritionally very similar seem more different than they actually are.

• Cognitive deception. Fake flavors fool the conscious mind. A mother enticed by a Dannon Strawberry Blitz Smoothie as an after-school snack for her eight-year-old child will taste it and reasonably believe the product contains strawberries, even though it contains none.

• Emotional deception. Flavor technology manipulates the part of the mind that experiences feelings. Fake flavors take a previously established liking for a real food and apply it, like a sticker, to something else—usually large doses of calories—creating a heightened and nutritionally undeserved level of pleasure.

• Flavor-nutrient confusion. By hijacking flavor-nutrient relationships, fake flavors, by their very nature, set a false expectation. A major aspect of obesity is an outsized desire for food, one that very often cannot be extinguished by food itself. By imposing flavors on foods without the corresponding nutrients, are we creating foods that are incapable of satiating the people who eat them? So many of the foods we overconsume—refined carbs, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar, added fat—would not be palatable without synthetic flavor. We gorge on them because they taste like something they are not.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“In nature, flavor never appears without nutrition. No morsel of food should pass your lips before you have asked the following question: Where did the flavor come from? If it came from the plant or animal you’re eating, keep eating. If it was applied by a human with a PhD in chemistry, put it down.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Eat a variety of real foods, including things you think you might hate, like broccoli, collard greens, liver, and mackerel. (Trust me: All are delicious.) Recognize that your palate is a growing, living thing. It can and it will change. What you liked when you were nine years old is not what you will like as an adult. Nibble new foods. Try something ten times before you know for sure you don’t like it. Above all, eat foods you find deeply satisfying.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“CUSTOMER: Do you have a book with a list of careers? I want to give my daughter some inspiration.
BOOKSELLER: Ah, is she applying to university?
CUSTOMER: Oh no, not yet. She’s just over there. Sweetheart? (a four year old girl comes over)
CUSTOMER: There you are. Now, you talk to the nice lady, and I’m going to find you a book on how to become a doctor or a scientist. What do you think about that? (The girl says nothing)
CUSTOMER (to bookseller): Won’t be a sec. (Customer wanders off into non-fiction) BOOKSELLER: So, what’s your name? CHILD: Sarah.
BOOKSELLER: Sarah? That’s a beautiful name.
CHILD: Thank you.
BOOKSELLER: So, Sarah, what do you want to be when you grow up?
CHILD: . . . A bumblebee.
BOOKSELLER: Excellent.”
― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

“They could fall in love with fresh new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of ‘otherness’, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked.”
― Liane Moriarty, The Husband's Secret

“She felt about her zester the way some women do about a pair of spiky red shoes—a frivolous splurge, good only for parties, but oh so lovely. The day Lillian had found the little utensil at a garage sale a year before, she had brought it to Abuelita, face shining. She didn’t even know what it was for back then, she just knew she loved its slim stainless-steel handle, the fanciful bit of metal at the working end with its five demure little holes, the edge scalloped around the openings like frills on a petticoat. There were so few occasions for a zester; using it felt like a holiday.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients

“Fear is the original sin,” suddenly said a still, small voice away back—back—back of Valancy’s consciousness. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

“I’ve always hated words of comfort. I don’t know if you should trust a person who says ‘It’s going to be OK’ unless they’re going to personally try and fix it.”
― Ayisha Malik, Sofia Khan is Not Obliged

“Keith Tyson, a winner of the Turner Prize, did a piece once where he just got the things already in the gallery and made them into artworks with what he called his ‘magical activation’. So he looked at the light switch and he called it ‘the apocalyptic switch’ and he looked at the light bulb and he called it ‘the light bulb of awareness’. He was using his power as an artist to designate things art, but it was within the art context.”
― Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery

“Alix Rule, a sociologist, and David Levine, an artist, fed the texts of thousands of press releases for contemporary art shows in public institutions through a language-analysing program and they came up with a few observations about what they called ‘International Art English’. ‘International Art English rebukes ordinary English for its lack of nouns. Visual becomes visuality. Global becomes globality. Potential becomes potentiality. And experience of course becomes experienceability.’ They describe the metaphysical seasickness you get from reading this sort of text, where it all sounds a bit like inexpertly translated French.”
― Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery

“A nagging thought: What did I have to show for all that free time the mothers didn’t have?”
― Meghan Daum, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Adults tend to forget – or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves – what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things. But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot – to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It’s like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven’t understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can’t wear out a book’s patience. And for a child there is so much information in a book, so much work to be done within and without. You can identify with the main or peripheral character (or parts of them all). You can enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of their adventures and rewards. You also have a role to play as interested onlooker, able to observe and evaluate participants’ reactions to events and to each other with a greater detachment, and consequent clarity sometimes, than they can. You are learning about people, about relationships, about the variety of responses available to them and in many more situations and circumstances (and at a much faster clip) than one single real life permits. Each book is a world entire. You’re going to have to take more than one pass at it.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“I also remember vividly that unexpected and at the time unprecedented breaking of the fourth wall at the beginning of the book: ‘This is Charlie. How d’you do? He is pleased to meet you.’ That sense of a supportive hand reaching out from the book to take yours is very comforting to a young reader.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“Blyton is not demanding. She is not an expander of minds like any one of the imaginatively and linguistically gifted authors already mentioned or still to be discussed. Her great gift lies in proving beyond doubt to children that reading can be fun, and reliably so. That the marks on the page will translate into life and colour and movement with ease. This is a thing you can master, a foundation upon which you can build, and also a retreat into which you can escape. She makes it all possible, time and time again. It was for this reason that Roald Dahl – whose own professed primary aim in writing for children was always to entertain them and thus induct them into the world of books – went to bat for her when he was on the 1988 Committee on English in the National Curriculum. He fell out with the rest of the board on the issue of whether her books should be welcomed in schools. Despite being no fan of either the work or the woman (he played bridge with her once and said afterwards that she had the mind of a child) he thought they should be embraced because they got children reading. The rest of the board disagreed and Dahl resigned his place.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“Norton was very short-sighted her whole life and the Borrowers’ environment, whether under the floorboards, out and about in the house’s drawing room and nursery or in the fields and furrows across which they travel in the sequels, always has an absolute authenticity about it – the textural truth of someone who has spent her life with her nose squashed up close to things. ‘Where others saw the far hills, the distant woods, the soaring pheasant,’ she once wrote in an essay, ‘I, as a child would turn sideways to the close bank, the tree-roots, and the tangled grasses. Moss, fern-stalks, sorrel stems, created the mise en scène for a jungle drama … One invented the characters – small, fearful people picking their way through miniature undergrowth; one saw smooth places where they might sit and rest; branched stems which might invite them to climb; sandy holes in which they might creep for shelter.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“How much more would I have longed for and needed to see myself in my books if I’d been disabled, gay, black, non-Christian or something else outside the mainstream message? By this time – the mid-1980s – writers’ and publishers’ consciousnesses of matters of sex, race and representation had started to be raised. The first wave of concern had come in the 1960s and 70s, mainly – or perhaps just most successfully – over the matter of heroines. There were some. But not many. And certainly not enough of the right – feisty, non-domestic, un-Meg Marchish – sort. Efforts needed to be made to overcome the teeny imbalance caused by 300 years of unreflecting patriarchal history. It’s this memory that convinces me of the importance of role models and the rightness of including (or as critics of the practice call it, ‘crowbarring in’) a wide variety of characters with different backgrounds, orientations and everything else into children’s books. If it seems – hell, even if it IS – slightly effortful at times, I suspect that the benefits (even though by their very nature as explosions of inward delight, wordless recognition, relief, succour, sustenance, those benefits are largely hidden) vastly outweigh the alleged cons. And I’m never quite sure what the cons are supposed to be anyway. Criticisms usually boil down to some variant of ‘I am used to A! B makes me uncomfortable! O, take the nasty B away!’ Which really isn’t good enough.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“When wise old rat Nicodemus is talking to Mrs Frisby about how they live compared to humans, he says: ‘A rat civilisation would probably never have built skyscrapers, since rats prefer to live underground. But think of the endless subways-below-subways-below-subways they would have had.’ I read that huddled in the story corner of Mrs Pugh’s class, and it felt like fireworks going off in my head. It wasn’t just watermelons but the whole world that could be different. It wasn’t preordained, or immutable or, indeed, even anything special. Just ours. Built and organised for us, by us, developed to serve our needs. I closed the book gently, almost reverently, almost as awed by its power to provide me with such new, previously unthinkable thoughts as I was by the thought itself. Nicodemus, his subways and his skyscrapers are the reason this is still the book I hold up during the periodic rows that break out among adults of a certain stripe about the worthlessness of certain children’s books (and I write this in the full knowledge that I will be coming out, and coming out hard, against Gossip Girl and Stephenie Meyer, but, believe me, I would be going a lot further were it not for Mrs Frisby’s gently restraining paw on my psyche) and assure them that you simply never know what a child is going to find in a book (or a graphic novel, or a comic, or whatever) – what tiny, throwaway line might be the spark that lights the fuse that sets off an explosion in understanding whose force echoes down years. And it enables me to keep, at bottom, the faith that children should be allowed to read anything at any time. They will take out of it whatever they are ready for. And just occasionally, it will ready them for something else.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“It also seems honorable that another woman would value motherhood over all my priorities. But I do not believe that I am selfish and she is not. There are women who choose motherhood for selfish reasons. There are mothers who act selfishly even if they chose motherhood in a burst of altruistic love. Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices, and if generosity is a worthy life goal—and I believe it is—perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity. It is quite possible that I would be a less generous teacher, a less supportive partner, a less available friend if I had children of my own to take care of. Love is not a pie, the saying goes, but it is also true that there are only so many hours in a day.”
― Meghan Daum, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“I’ll venture to suggest that we childless ones, whether through bravery or cowardice, constitute a kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove to ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.”
― Meghan Daum, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

“Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! You have this thing you call… boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song — it went 'Twinkle twinkle little star….’ What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time. It can be an evening just outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or maps, or chess, or coffee….”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“The fragrance that permeates his picture of the good life is not the heavy fragrance of rose-petals and incense falling upon languorous couches: it is the fragrance of the morning grass, and the scent of crushed mint or marjoram beneath the feet.”
― Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias