Bartlett's Quotes

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped and summer was gone.

Sometimes... the first step to forgiveness is realizing that the other person... is batshit crazy.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called 'Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!' The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view.

And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history. Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.

A book is much more than a delivery vehicle for its contents.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” —Albert A. Bartlett

The human soul was a deep, dark forest and all decisions are made alone.

She turned back to inspect a bank of greens: olive, jade, leaf, kiwi, lime, a silver-green like the back of birch leaves, a bright pistachio.

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

As she rattles on, about Violet, about Gemma Sterling, about the Bartlett Dirt, I don’t say anything else. I suddenly don’t want Bren or Charlie to talk about Violet, because I want to keep her to myself, like the Christmas I was eight—back when Christmases were still good—and got my first guitar, which I named No Trespassing, as in no one could touch it but me.

Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things — and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most.

When a day goes by and I haven't written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.

Everything you do leaves traces, doesn't it. The life you've lived is written all over you, for those who can read.

Stop telling yourself you’re not qualified, good enough or worthy. Growth happens when you start doing the things you’re not qualified to do.

if you want to keep someone’s brain lit up and receptive to your point of view, you must not start your response with a statement of disagreement.

We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity.

Maybe you’ve always been happy, but the world, social media and external comparisons have convinced you that you can’t possibly be.

The greatest challenge of parenting is in the inner work it requires: the strength and confidence in believing that we are not in control of, but the answer for our children.

You are more than your thoughts, your body, or your feelings. You are a swirling vortex of limitless potential who is here to shake things up and create something new that the universe has never seen.

He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odor nor perfume—just strange, and curiously exciting. “Superintendent, what’s that smell? Casey noticed it too, the moment Sven opened the door.” Armstrong hesitated. Then he smiled. “That’s Hong Kong’s very own, Mr. Bartlett. It’s money.

Among the most ghastly sounds a man can hear is the sound of a voice in what he thought was an empty house.

Creating our own realities is nothing new, but now it’s easier than ever to become trapped in echo chambers of our own making.

I drove on, and between the north and southbound lanes a construction crew worked under daylight-bright industrial lamps. I saw them through a gauzy fog of dust and strong light...they wore blood-red vests and hardhats and massive goggles, and as the road sank I saw that the workers were bone thin, with skeletal jaws and long teeth. They labored on platforms over gaping holes in the earth, and among the men, piled atop rickety pallets, lolled babies, piles of them, in ashy cerements. I could not tell whether the crew was excavating or burying them.

The stories we are told as children do, undoubtedly, mark us for life. They are often stories of dark and terrible things, and we are usually told them just before the lights are turned out and we are left alone; but we love them. We love them when we first hear them, and even when we are grown, and think we have forgotten them entirely, they never lose their power over us.

Those of us who believe in princesses are often laughed at. But I believe the world needs princesses and dukes and queens and kings. We need people who glitter and shine and make a room silent with their entrance. We need them the same way we need ice cream and soccer and music and stories. Oh, how we need stories.

The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin.

To make a lacy texture of holes and fills, turn around and purl. Pearl is also a kind of colour. Colours are all the colours of the rainbow and the colours between the rainbow colours between. I can never get indigo. Year after year, I wait for indigo, but even when the fashion is navy, you never get indigo, the glow, the long slow glow of indigo in the high night sky.