Rosenfield Quotes & Sayings

She was dry, dry inside like a ten-thousand-year-old tomb, with the last of her life barely dampening the dirt underneath. — Kat Rosenfield

An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races. — G.K. Chesterton

Once upon a time, the great big world outside Bridgeton had seemed like Xanadu - miles of golden road lined with smiling people, waiting to usher me through hundreds of open doors. There was nothing out there but bright light and possibilities. There were big dreams of other places, other people, even other boys.
There had even, for two hours in April, been somebody else.
He was a glimpse of the future, where I would live and breath and love far, far away from this place. A future where behind a closed door, on Saturday mornings, a boy I hadn't met yet would wrap an arm around my waist and exhale damp heat into the curve of my neck. Where we would keep our eyes closed, pull the covers closer, burrow down and deeper to escape the nine-o'clock sunshine, and the sound of heavy breath echoing along the rusted steel confines of a pickup truck would be nothing but a memory. — Kat Rosenfield

Father Ratti had often explained, in Religious Knowledge class, that true humility did not mean a sense of worthlessness or the kind of timidity that caused some people to be cheated and bullied all their lives. The virtue of humility, Ratti said, was merely the faculty of intelligence operating properly "The man of wisdom," Ratti explained once, "fears only one man on earth. Do you know who that is?" And when everybody guessed wrong - some said the Pope, some said King Ferdinand - Ratti said, "The man of wisdom fears himself. He knows who it is who tells him the most plausible lies, the lies he wants to believe. — Robert Anton Wilson

She stared at him. His eyes were glazed, glassy, blazing with triumph behind his glasses, and as his lip curled in a sneer, she felt it happen.
Her love for him - whatever shred of it was left - was gone. It had slunk away into the night. It would die out there, and she would not be sorry to leave it, at the side of the road, in a no-name town surrounded by nothing but blackness.
Quietly, she said, "Knew what, exactly?"
He licked his lips.
"I knew you'd never turn into such a whore without a little help."
"Good-bye."
The word was out, and she was gone. — Kat Rosenfield

Our destinies depend on the choices we make. Be it wise or stupid. — Paul Nat

Don't be so glued to what you planned that you can't change it. — Lee Carroll

There is no narrative now, no "And then," only a disjointed series of images. A pile of photographs I've flipped through so many times that I don't even need to look at them anymore to know what's there, to see it, to cover my face with my hands and cry. — Kat Rosenfield

Faith is the only known antidote for failure! — Napoleon Hill

In a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn't telling. — Kat Rosenfield

Historians constantly rewrite history, reinterpreting (reorganizing) the records of the past. So, too, when the brain's coherent responses become part of a memory, they are organized anew as part of the structure of consciousness. What makes them memories is that they become part of that structure and thus form part of the sense of self; my sense of self derives from a certainty that my experiences refer back to me, the individual who is having them. Hence the sense of the past, of history, of memory, is in part the creation of the self. — Israel Rosenfield

When you made plans, the saboteurs came out to play. — Kat Rosenfield

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

I just don't think pastors should turn their pulpits into public policy platforms. It cheapens the gospel. Our congregation doesn't need another political opinion. They need spiritual revelation. They don't need to think about politics on the weekend. They need to be reminded to seek first the kingdom of God. — Mark Batterson

Murder in a small town is always more than a paragraph in the local paper. In a place so insulated, where lives are so small and gone about so quietly, violent death hangs in the air - tinting everything crimson, weaving itself into the shimmering heat that rises off the winding asphalt roads at noon. It oozes from taps and runs through the gas pumps. It sits at the dinner table, murmuring in urgent low tones under the clinking of glassware. — Kat Rosenfield

One girl lost forever to this stagnant place was enough. — Kat Rosenfield

I have learned that knowing where you're going means remembering where you've been. I'm not afraid of what lurks behind me, or ahead. — Kat Rosenfield

People romanticize, I think, this notion of life. But life at all costs is not life, it's ego-extension. — Emily Susan Rapp

Our knowledge has no memory. We have always lived here; what we know has always been. — Kat Rosenfield

I shook my head. "it's not about living in a city."
It wasn't. Back then, it wasn't just getting away. It was about not coming back. It wasn't just the size and sensibility of this place that made in unbearable, but its pull - the weird magnetism that could sap your ambition, clip your wings, leave you inert and fascinated and sinking ever deeper into the choking quicksand of small-town life. — Kat Rosenfield

In 1986, I read a remarkable article by Israel Rosenfield in The New York Review of Books in which he discussed the revolutionary work and views of Gerald M. Edelman. Edelman was nothing if not bold. We are at the beginning of — Oliver Sacks

The point of language puts us in the same position as lightning. — Kim Rosenfield

Just because it's not hard science, just because it doesn't lead to a high-paying job at a hedge fund after college, doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing. — Kat Rosenfield

I'd seen it happen, how hard it was to get out. Every year, one or two kids would visit from college for a long October weekend and simply never leave. They came home, cocooned themselves in the familiar radius of the town limits, and never broke free again. Years later, you'd see them working in the kitchen at the pizza place, or sitting at the bar in the East Bank Tavern. Shoulders hunched, jaw set, skin slack. And in the waning light of their eyes, the barest sensation that once upon a time, they been somewhere else ... or maybe it was only a dream. — Kat Rosenfield

An anonymous death in a small town, that's a different thing. It makes people uneasy. They stop gossiping, talk only with trusted friends, or - realizing that nobody can truly be trusted - they don't talk at all. Instead of settling in the streets or running through the municipal sewer system, murder moves inside. It becomes internalized. It seeps around the corners of locked front doors. It creeps into people's bedrooms. It runs in their veins. — Kat Rosenfield

Nakata's empty inside ... Do you know what it means to be completely empty? Being empty is like a vacant house. An unlocked, vacant house. Anybody can come in, anytime they want. That's what scares me the most — Haruki Murakami

For many, the emotional trauma of a broken heart can manifest as real, physical pain. — Kat Rosenfield

Embrace your complexity, stretch your creativity, and live up to your potential, you are what makes the world great. — Dan Wells

So from now on, screw "perfect." Forget for a while about what kind of person you want to be, and just be the best version of the person you are. Figure out which of your classmates you genuinely like (not who you want to like you), and get to know them by telling your own stories and listening to theirs. Hang out with the people you think are cool, not the people you'd like to be considered cool by. Do things because they interest you, not because they make you look interesting ... and then, take stock in a month and see whether you're not happier, healthier, and working on some actual friendships with other imperfect-but-lovely humans. — Kat Rosenfield

Success in confronting terrorism on the regional or international levels is contingent upon addressing its root causes and protecting the right of peoples under foreign occupation to resistance — Farouk Of Egypt

She had been derailed, delayed, detained forever at the side of the road in a town surrounded by nothingness. — Kat Rosenfield

If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave were ink,
Your own handwriting would tell you what I think. — William Shakespeare

In books, in songs, in stories, love is floating thing. A falling thing. A flying thing. A good-bye to all your little earthbound worries, as you soar heart-first toward a light pink sky and your dangling feet forget the feel of the ground.
Only I know, now: it isn't like that at all.
Love is a sense of place. It's effortless balance, no stumbling, no stammering. It's your own voice, quiet but strong, and the sense that you can open your mouth, speak your mind, and never feel afraid. A known quantity, a perfect fit. It's the thing that holds you tight to the earth, fast and solid, and sure. You feel it, and feel that it's right and true, and you know exactly where you are:
Here. — Kat Rosenfield

You know I can't go out there. There's daylight outside. (Ravyn) Well, that's what happens when the big yellow ball comes up over the mountains. Amazing isn't it? (Susan) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Stop and think as you pass by, she hissed. As you are now, so once was I. — Kat Rosenfield

The problem is that we cannot recognize that what we say about out thoughts and actions is, at best, incoherent; we can and do recognize this after the fact. But once having admitted to ourselves our own subterfuges we are confronted by newer forms, which again we only recognize after the fact. We can never at the moment itself be honest with ourselves, never really understand when we are acting out what we are truly all about. It is only in retrospect that we can explain ourselves, and this retrospective view is hardly reassuring because it does so little to alter our behavior in the future — Israel Rosenfield

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light. — Kat Rosenfield