Bette Howland Quotes

“For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first some unfinished business time still to be served a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”

“Every time you feel like mocking a person you disagree with politically by implying that they are mentally ill, I want you to instead imagine you are talking to every single person who actually is mentally ill and telling them they are worthless. That's how it makes mentally ill people feel. Doesn't seem very progressive now does it?”

“We didn't kiss," I said. Jules cocked an eyebrow. "We brushed lips.”

“And what if that news anchor is creepy? He's too smooth, and he has that hairpiece.”

“The Mercy of Allah is an Ocean, Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean.It only has to open it's beak”

“We cannot save everyone, can we?’ I said to her as we continued walking on our way. I turned my head back only to find the spot the beggar had occupied empty. ‘Not everyone,’ she said. She took my hand once more in hers, kissed the back of it, and finished one of the sincerest axioms I had heard in sometime. ‘We must save,’ she said, ‘only the ones we can while we can.’Leila Bakr, in A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, and speaking to her love, John Lockwood”

“Throughout it all, you are still, always, you: beautiful and bruised, known and unknowable.”

“I think part of the problem with charity is that it tends to make us view people as helpless victims. I think in the future, we'll look back on charity in the same way that we look back on colonialism today: as a very paternalistic system that doesn't fully recognise the full spectrum of humanity.”

“The core concept of Samasource is essentially that technology helps us unlock human talent wherever it may happen to reside. That we should no longer be victims of the birth lottery. That no one should be stuck in a poor place where they don't have a job simply because of an accident of birth.”

“Often, we think that things are the way they are because of intelligent design - because somebody super-smart, or some group of academics, came up with the best system ever to do XYZ. Actually, things are often the way they are because of an accident of history.”