Bauer Quotes

My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.

Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.

You've got to love yourself with all your short comings, and you've got to love the world no matter how bad it gets.

You cannot measure the loss of a human life. It's all the things a person was, all their dreams, all the people who loved them, all they hoped to be and could give back to the world.

Almost. It’s a big word for me. I feel it everywhere. Almost home. Almost happy. Almost changed. Almost, but not quite. Not yet. Soon, maybe. I’m hoping hard for that.

It was probably easier in the old days when the bad guys rode into town wearing black capes or whatever bad guys wore and the milk cows were ownded by honest people. Right off the bat, you'd know who you were dealing with. Now everybody dresses alike.

That's impossible," I replied. Diane Monroe and Ryan Bauer had been together for four years. They were supposed to get married, have 2.4 kids, and have a 50 percent chance of living happily ever after.

When we don't have the words chocolate can speak volumes.

Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.

We read to learn and to grow, to laugh, to be motivated, and to understand things we've never been exposed to. We read for strength to help us when we feel broken, discouraged or afraid. We read to find hope. We read because we're not just made up of skin and bones, and a deep need for chocolate, but we're also made up of words, words which describe our thoughts and what's hidden in our hearts.

It was February sixth: eight days until Valentine's Day. I was dateless, as usual, deep in the vice grip of unrequited love. It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids in their windows by January second to rub it in.

I've never said this to a girl before." I bit my lip, waiting. "Well..." He looked down. "I'm not sure how to say this." He took a deep breath and announced, "I really like fighting evil with you.

...motherhood should be like driving a car -- you should have to pass a test before you can do it legally.

You don't know which way a thing will come at you, but you need to welcome it with your whole heart which ever way it arrives.

I hope you'll have the kind of life where what you stand for is so important that it makes some people outright hostile. You won't know how strong your beliefs really are until you have to defend them.

Staring down hard truth takes guts.

I'll tell you something about tough times. They just about kill you, but if you decide to keep working at them, you'll find your way through.

It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids on their windows by January second to rub it in. (Thwonk)

And we learned that you don't have to be famous or rich or physically healthy to be a leader. You just have to try to be a true person. We learned that helping other people brings out the good in everybody.

Everyone needs fudge, Hildy. It's how God helps us cope.

When you have something so important, something that you'll stay awake for, something you know that you were designed to do, well, it's worth getting a few dark circles, don't you think?

You don't understand how much light you have until the lights go out.

Some things go too deep for words.

Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.

Mom put dense cheddar bread into a bag for a man who said this was his wife's favorite - he'd driven all the way from New Jersey to buy it because today was their anniversary. Several women in the store jabbed their husbands on hearing this. I hung my head - Peter Terris wouldn't cross the street to buy me a Twinkie.

...Difficult relationships come into our lives for a reason. No one would choose them, certainly. But if we let them, they can teach us how to be flexible with others and more forgiving.

when hope gets released in a place, all kinds of things are possible

The problem with the heart is how it can have so many opposite feelings coursing through it all at the same time. It's really an inconsistent thing- appreciating something one minute and hating it the next.

You know where we got stuck? We were looking for faithfull, loving and perfect relationships-males who were always glad to see us." "So?" "We already have that!" "What do you mean?" "We've got dogs!

New places always help us look at life differently

I will tear apart the planet. Cross continents, oceans…” He shrugged. “Nothing will keep me from him. And nothing will stop me from protecting him. I’ll die for him. In a heartbeat.

I had taken the photograph from afar (distance being the basic glitch in our relationship), using my Nikon and zoom lens while hiding behind a fake marble pillar. I was hiding because if he knew I'd been secretly photographing him for all these months he would think I was immature, neurotic and obsessive. I'm not. I'm an artist. Artists are always misunderstood.(Thwonk)

...It isn't the problems along the way that make us or break us. It's how we learn to stand and face them that makes the difference.

They marched. Not for themselves. They marched to remember the ones who didn't make it back. They marched because seeing so much loss can teach you about life. they marched because we're all fighting a war whether we know it or not...a war for our minds and souls and what we believe in.

Have you ever noticed that it takes a textbook dozens of pages to say what normal people can cover fast? Example: What was the full impact of World War II? Clear-cut teenage answer: we won.

Cope or die.

He stood up, put the tree back under the grow light. 'There. That's what's going to happen to us. It's called grafting. Taking something from one place and fixing it to another until they grow together. We didn't start from the same tree, but we're going to grow together like we did.

I don't do normal. I have a reputation to uphold. (Thwonk)

My father always told me that in this world we are going to make a truckload of mistakes, but the best mistake we can ever make is to err on the side of mercy

You know what it's like to move from being happy to being not? It's like swinging as high as you can and someone stops you as you come back down.

When you can carry five full dinner platters on your left arm, you should be able to vote, even if you're not eighteen.

Like my grandmother always said, 'you never know the blessings that come from suffering.

Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a person is to have a puppy lick your face.

Sometimes just getting up in the morning and standing at the gate can bring the gate down.

Librarians understand about power - they know how to find anything.

A good friend of mine once said, "I have never met a bigot who was a reader as a child.

There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer exist.

Never let anyone else define your life, Kris. Never let anyone else define who you are. They will always get it wrong. Never settle for that.

Do not be a perpetrator. Do not be a bystander. Do not be a victim.

If you worry about every little thing you're going to have one thoroughly miserable life.

Some part of getting a second chance is taking responsibility for the mess you made in the first place.

You are the gradations of undiscovered colors in my soul. You are the inhale before my blank canvas, the moment before my pencil touches the page. You are the manifestation of my dreams. You are my intensity.

it's a complete rush to get what you've been hoping for - to get it so full and complete that it fills your senses.

Know why I plant trees?" "No." "I like thinking that they'll be here long after I'm gone. All those fine memories pushing up to the sky.

You need a negative charge and a positive one to get something moving. We've got the negative; we're going to find the positive if it kills us.

The only men ruthless enough to fight against tyranny were themselves inclined to it.

Teenagers are like bees at night, I think. We don't like waking up and we don't always get with the program immediately, but once we figure out our mission, we'll see it through.

The coma ward was boring yet difficult. Like golf.

The adhan,” the father explained. “God is great; there is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” he looked up at me and smiled. “In Islam, we want the first words a child hears to be a prayer.” It seemed absolutely fitting, give the miracle that every baby is. The differences between the Muslim father's request and the request made by Turk Bauer was like the difference between day and night. Between love and hate.

Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you're thinking bloom upon your face, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather.

It seemed to me that the people who made the rules of the road had figured out everything that would help a person drive safely right down to having a sign that tells you you're passing through a place where deer cross. Somebody should stick up some signs on the highway of life. CAUTION: JERKS CROSSING. Blinking yellow lights when you're about to to something stupid. Stop signs in front of people who could hurt you. Green lights shining when you're doing the right thing. It would make the whole experience easier.

It is the nature of stories to leave out far more than they include.

Everything's got a purpose, really - you just have to look for it. Cats are good at keeping old dogs alive. Loss helps you reach for gain. Death helps you celebrate life. War helps you work for peace. A flood makes you glad you're still standing. And a tall boy can stop the wind so a candle of hope can burn bright.

Nothing like a cheap shot, right?’ He snorted blood from his nose. ‘I’m disappointed. I thought even terrorists had principles.’ ‘Can it,’ Nasira said, towering over him with her P90 leveled at his head. ‘If we need patriotic paramoralisms, we’ll give Jack Bauer a call.’ Denton grimaced, pulled himself upright. ‘And if I need overblown alliteration, I’ll give you a call.

Will we have bodyguards?" "We're not quite set up for that. But with all these mothers, you don't need them.

If she's really psychic," Zack said when he saw Tanisha's photo at school, "why does she need a doorbell?

Sometimes you've got to shout the truth and wake people up.

sometimes a kid has to act older than they are

Now I see that it isn't the problems along the way that make us or break us. It's how we learn to stand and face them that makes the difference.

I had expected the well to be full for some reason. Not that it had ever been before. I kept looking for signs of water in the dark insides. I heard my bucket clank as it hit Against the walls that held nothing. I look at the bucket that came up empty And made a decision that changed my life. I will keep my bucket and find another well.

The sad heart needs work to do.

Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.

Everybody else possessed the key to popularity and happiness, and his clumsy attempts to find his own key always ended with other children looking at him funny, or calling him names.

We were having the best time working together, too, except when he'd make a mistake on an order and I'd have to be an advocate for my customer. I always mentioned it sweetly. "You didn't say hold the bacon, Hope." "Barverman, I said it twice." "You must have said it to someone else." "I said it to you." Clang. "Don't clang pots at me.

It takes a great cook to pull life truth from poultry.

Perchance, I would listen. Have you said anything?

But then Macon smiled at me. "Just be yourself, Foster. That's the best thing in the world.

Almost. It’s a big word for me. I feel it everywhere. Almost home. Almost happy. Almost changed. Almost, but not quite. Not yet. Soon, maybe.

Any nonsense can attain importance by virtue of being believed by millions of people,” Einstein

Not all vegetables are this draining. Lettuce doesn't bring heartache. Turnips don't ask for your soul. Potatoes don't care where you are or even where they are. Tomatoes cuddle up to anyone who'll give them mulch and sunshine. But giants like Max need you every second. You can forget about a whiz-bang social life.

Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.

Harrison wrote a two-page poem about his deep feelings of loss when his dog Filbert died, and Mrs. Minerva, the creative writing teacher, gave it a B-minus. Do you know what that does to a a person to get a B-minus in Grief?

Almost Home by Sugar Mae Cole Home isn’t always a place you picture in your mind With furniture and cookies and music playing and people laughing. Home is something you can carry around like a dream And let it grow in your heart until you’re ready for it. Losing things helps you appreciate when you find them again And finding things gives you hope that when you lose things It might not be forever. Once, long ago, a girl lost her home, but she didn’t lose her dream. She hung on to it as the wind kept trying to blow it away, But that just made it stronger. So now she has keys and walls of many colors And people around her who think she’s something.

To quote Shirley Polanski, head waitress at the Humdinger Diner: "Beware of a big man whose stomach doesn't move when he laughs." I think a Chinese philosopher said it first, but these things trickle down to the food service community.

The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.

He stared at Avery's socks and felt an odd sense of wonder. Socks were so normal. So mundane. How could someone who pulled on socks in the morning be a serial killer? Socks were not hard or dangerous. Socks were funny; foot mittens, that's what socks were. They made a knobbly hinge of your toes and became comical sock-puppets. Surely anyone who wore socks could not truly be a threat to him or anyone else?

I'm working hard to have a good life. You don't need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people, the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over, too.

I am in no mood to fulminate on paper--I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.

We've got so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things--things we can see--as being the measure of a person. We think if we win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we are. Our hearts know that's not true, but the eyes are powerful. It's easier to fix on what we can see than listen to the still, small voice of a whispering heart.

The power of fiction is that it gives us, as readers, the opportunity to move inside another human being, to look out through that person's eyes, hear with her ears, think with his thoughts, feel with her feelings. It is the only form of art which can accomplish that feat so deeply, so completely. And thus it is the perfect bridge for helping us coming to know the other - the other inside as well as outside ourselves. (x)

A child can unlove you. A child can look at you and find you wanting, realize you’re not great, not wonderful. Parents don’t get a free pass on a lifetime of love. Blood loyalty doesn’t run upstream. If you’re a terrible parent, there’s no obligation for your child to love you after the nightmares you’ve put them through. A child’s love is hard-fought, hard-won. You have to earn it.

Mom has the Touch. She knows what flowers go with what occasions, what hors d'oeuvres work with what people. She believes passionately in the power of food to heal, restore, and stimulate relationships, and she has built a following of loyal customers who really hope she's right. If she's wrong, says Sonia, no one wants to know.

Mom's note on the dining room table to me and Faith read: Daughters of mine, In case you haven't noticed, no one has seen the top of our dining room table in months. I seem to recall it is oak, but as the days dwindle by, I'm less and less sure. Perhaps this is because your school books, files, papers, magazines, letters, underwear, etc., are shielding it from normal use. My goal for you, dear offspring, to be accomplished in twenty-four hours (no excuses), is the clearing/exhuming of this space so that we may gather around it once again and spend quality time. Even though I am working the night shift, I will still be watching. Do it or die. Your loving mother

I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that spoke volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you've ached over, sweated over. (Thwonk)

What's wrong with the world," Nana explained, "is that people stopped listening to their hearts... "Not everybody stopped listening," she continued, "but enough people did to make a difference. We've go so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things--things we can see--as being the measure of a person. We think if we can win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we are. Our hearts know that's not true, but the eyes are powerful. It's easier to fix on what we can see than listen to the still, small voice of a whispering heart." Nana turned her eyes on me like a vet looking for fleas: "A heart will say amazing things if it's given half a chance.

Like prison systems throughout the South, Texas's grew directly out of slavery. After the Civil War the state's economy was in disarray, and cotton and sugar planters suddenly found themselves without hands they could force to work. Fortunately for them, the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, left a loophole. It said that 'neither slavery nor involuntary servitude' shall exist in the United States 'except as punishment for a crime.' As long as black men were convicted of crimes, Texas could lease all of its prisoners to private cotton and sugar plantations and companies running lumber camps and coal mines, and building railroads. It did this for five decades after the abolition of slavery, but the state eventually became jealous of the revenue private companies and planters were earning from its prisoners. So, between 1899 and 1918, the state bought ten plantations of its own and began running them as prisons.

The mystery of this courage of Bauer’s is Hegel’s Phenomenology. As Hegel here puts self-consciousness in the place of man, the most varied human reality appears only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness. But a mere determination of self-consciousness is a “pure category,” a mere “thought” which I can consequently also abolish in “pure” thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel’s Phenomenology the material, perceptible, objective bases of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are left as they are. Thus the whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously real world, by merely transforming it into a “thing of thought” a mere determination of self-consciousness and can therefore dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the “ether of pure thought.” Phenomenology is therefore quite logical when in the end it replaces human reality by “Absolute Knowledge”—Knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, because self-consciousness is considered as the only mode of existence of man; absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows itself alone and is no more disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, man living in a real objective world and determined by that world. He stands the world on its head and can therefore dissolve in the head all the limitations which naturally remain in existence for evil sensuousness, for real man. Besides, everything which betrays the limitations of general self-consciousness—all sensuousness, reality, individuality of men and of their world—necessarily rates for him as a limit. The whole of Phenomenology is intended to prove that self-consciousness is the only reality and all reality.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

Menulis berarti menciptakan duniamu sendiri.” Stephen King “Menulis itu pekerjaan orang kesepian. Punya seseorang yang memercayaimu dapat membuat perbedaan besar. Hanya percaya saja biasanya sudah cukup.” Stephen King “Menulis fiksi seperti memasak.” Donatus A. Nugroho "Menulis itu gampang." Arswendo Atmowiloto “Tulislah apa yang kau ketahui seluas dan sedalam mungkin.” Stephen King “Sedapat mungkin aku tidak melakukan keduanya, yaitu membuat alur cerita dan berbohong. Cerita itu terjadi dengan sendirinya, tugas penulis adalah membiarkan cerita itu berkembang.” Stephen King “Engkau harus berkata jujur, jika ingin dialogmu punya gema dan realistis.” Stephen King “Semua novel pada dasarnya adalah surat-surat yang ditujukan kepada seseorang.” Anonim/Stephen King “Aku menulis setiap hari, termasuk hari libur. Aku termasuk pecandu kerja.” Stephen King “Membaca adalah pusat kreatif kehidupan seorang penulis. Aku membawa buku ke mana pun aku pergi dan menemukan peluang untuk menenggelamkan diri dalam bacaan.” Stephen King “Kalau engkau ingin menjadi penulis, ada dua hal yang harus kau lakukan, banyak membaca dan menulis. Setahuku, tidak ada jalan lain selain dua hal ini. Dan tidak ada jalan pintas.” Stephen King "Menulis fiksi seperti permainan Roller Coaster." RL Stine “Aku akan menulis (terus) sekalipun belum tahu akan diterbitkan atau tidak.” JK Rowling “Aku ingin menulis, bukan harus menulis.” Anonim “Seseorang yang menuliskan suatu kisah, terlalu tertarik pada kisah itu sendiri sehingga tidak bisa duduk tenang dan memerhatikan (cara teknik) bagaimana ia menuliskannya.” CS Lewis “Aku menulis untuk diri sendiri, aku rasa tak seorang pun akan menikmati buku ini lebih dari yang kurasakan saat membacanya.” JK Rowling “Menulis novel harus berbekal sesuatu yang Anda yakini agar Anda tetap bertahan.” JK Rowling “Selalu ada ruang untuk sebuah cerita yang dapat memindahkan pembaca ke tempat lain.” JK Rowling “Aku takut kalau tak dapat menemukan alasan untuk melanjutkan menulis.” JK Rowling “Bila aku tidak menulis, aku merasa hidupku tidak normal.” JK Rowling “Beberapa hal memang lebih baik tinggal menjadi imajinasi belaka.” JK Rowling “Harry tak pernah menyerah terus berjuang menggunakan kombinasi antara intuisi, ketegangan syaraf dan sedikit keberuntungan.” JK Rowling “Kamu mungkin tidak akan bisa membuat karyamu diterbitkan di penerbit manapun.” Marion D. Bauer “Kebanyakan para penulis, bahkan karya penulis dewasa, tidak akan diterbitkan. Selamanya. Namun, mereka tetap saja menulis karena ini menyenangkan.” Marion D. Bauer “Bagi semua penulis, profesional maupun amatir imbalan yang terbesar terletak dalam proses penulisan, bukan dalam sesuatu yang terjadi sesudahnya. Mengumpulkan ide dan melihatnya menjadi hidup dalam kertas sudah cukup menggembirakan.” Marion D. Bauer “Kabar buruk: Sangat sulit untuk membuat bukumu diterbitkan. Jika tulisanmu berhasil diterbitkan, kamu mungkin tidak akan menjadi terkenal, kamu tidak akan menjadi kaya. Seorang penulis harus belajar sendiri dan bekerja sendiri. Kabar baik: Membuat tulisanmu diterbitkan akan menjadi lebih mudah setelah kamu berhasil menapakkan kaki di pintu penerbitan. Kamu bahkan mungkin bisa menjadi terkenal, atau mungkin saja kamu lebih memilih kehidupan yang sederhana. Beberapa penulis menjadi kaya. Bekerja sendirian mungkin bukan masalah bagimu. Kamu bisa menjadi penguasa bagi kehidupan kerjamu sendiri. Yang terpenting dari segalanya kamu bisa melakukan pekerjaan yang kamu cintai.” Marion D. Bauer “Aku akan terus menulis meski tulisanku tidak menghasilkan uang sesen pun, bahkan jika tidak ada orang yang mau membacanya. Aku merasa sangat beruntung bisa merintis karir di bidang penulisan.” Marion D. Bauer "Menulis dapat membuat orang bisa menjadi lebih baik karena dia melihat pantulan dirinya." Asma Nadia