Quotes Archives - The Patient Poppy

March 26, 2023March 8, 2023

We want to be remembered

This is a quote from the book Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Quote by Emily St. John Mandel, “First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we wanted to be remembered.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Station Eleven – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

March 19, 2023January 15, 2023

Crying was delicious

This is a quote from the story Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from another story from Dorothy Parker here.

Collection of short stories – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Three brilliant tales by a master storyteller: ‘Big Blonde’, ‘The Sexes’ and ‘Dusk Before Fireworks’.

W. Somerset Maugham on Parker: ‘Dorothy Parker has a wonderfully delicate ear for human speech …. Her style is easy without being slipshod and cultivated without affectation. It is a perfect instrument for the display of her many-sided humour, her irony, her sarcasm, her tenderness, her pathos.’

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

March 12, 2023January 15, 2023

We don’t know

This is a quote from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Translated by: Stephen Snyder

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

March 5, 2023January 15, 2023

I like his eyes

This is a quote from the book Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Wise Blood – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Flannery O’Connor’s haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a blind street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with wise blood, who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes’s existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

February 26, 2023February 23, 2023

I could not share…

This is a quote from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Fire Next Time – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.

More details can be found on Goodreads and on Storygraph.

February 19, 2023February 19, 2023

Just sit awhile

This is a quote from the book A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry.

Have you read this play? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

A Raisin in the Sun – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

“Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.

Indeed Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America–and changed American theater forever. The play’s title comes from a line in Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which warns that a dream deferred might “dry up/like a raisin in the sun.”

“The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun,” said The New York Times. “It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic.” This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry’s landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

February 12, 2023January 15, 2023

Just felt like gravity

This is a quote from the book Memorial by Bryan Washington.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Memorial – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson’s a Black day care teacher, and they’ve been together for a few years — good years — but now they’re not sure why they’re still a couple. There’s the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.

But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike’s immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they’ve ever known. And just maybe they’ll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you’re supposed to be, and the limits of love.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

February 5, 2023January 15, 2023

I feel, therefore I can be free

This is a quote from the essay Poetry is Not a Luxury by Audre Lorde.

Have you read this essay by Audre Lorde? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s “intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible” (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

Self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

January 29, 2023January 15, 2023

Whatever is hated…

This is a quote from the book The Promise by Damon Galgut.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Promise – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for — not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land… yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator’s eye shifts and blinks: moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel’s title.

In this story of a diminished family, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. Confident, deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is literary fiction at its finest.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

January 22, 2023December 5, 2022

Still kissing her

This is a quote from the book Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Ethan Frome – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

A marked departure from Edith Wharton’s usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged, Ethan From is is a sharply-etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife’s young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by that which offers him the greatest chance of happiness. Like The House Of Mirth, and many of Edith Wharton’s other novels, Ethan Frome centers on the power of the local convention to smother the growth of the individual. Written with stark simplicity, this powerful and tragic novel has long been considered one of her greatest works.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

Category: Quotes

We want to be remembered

Station Eleven – Summary

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Crying was delicious

Collection of short stories – Summary

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We don’t know

The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary

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I like his eyes

Wise Blood – Summary

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I could not share…

The Fire Next Time – Summary

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Just sit awhile

A Raisin in the Sun – Summary

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Just felt like gravity

Memorial – Summary

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I feel, therefore I can be free

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde – Summary

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Whatever is hated…

The Promise – Summary

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Still kissing her

Ethan Frome – Summary

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Station Eleven – Summary

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Collection of short stories – Summary

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The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary

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Wise Blood – Summary

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The Fire Next Time – Summary

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A Raisin in the Sun – Summary

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Memorial – Summary

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The Selected Works of Audre Lorde – Summary

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The Promise – Summary

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Ethan Frome – Summary

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