Ignorant Historian

“She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.”  – Empire Falls by Richard Russo, p. 161

“…but where is the woman, in the whole range of our sex, who can regulate her actions by the abstract principles of honor, when those principles point one way and when her affections, and the interest which grow out of them, point the other?” – Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, p. 176-177

“She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact you’d only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces.” – Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, p. 90

“If you’re white they don’t let you grow up to adulthood if you haven’t mastered the art of pretending to say one thing while actually intending to do another.” - Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card, p. 153

“But if there are no gods, why are we so hungry to believe in them?” – Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card, p. 177

“I don’t want to be married just to be married.  I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, that I can’t be silent with.” – Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, p. 8

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.” – Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, p. 53

“To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid.  A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.” – Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, p. 1o4

“Covetousness is desiring something so much that you lose your contentment in God.” – Future Grace by John Piper, p. 221

” ‘The United States of America has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play a great part in the world.’ Roosevelt would argue.  ‘It must play a great part.  All that it can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.’ ” – FDR quoted in The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama, p. 333

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