The Year in Quotes

I am sure I have been happier to see a year disappear - 2020 seems a prime candidate - but this one certainly ranks toward the top. The past 6 months have especially sucked. Assuming you've been reading all along, you don't need a recount of the suckiness. What would be the point of that, really? Retelling woes doesn't make them any more palatable.

I will instead share this with you. After my friend's funeral this weekend, a group of us went to lunch and I commented that life could be pretty mean sometimes. Someone replied that well yes it is, but if it were good all the time, we wouldn't know to appreciate it. How would you know that the good parts are good without the painful stuff? I guess if I have resolutions for the new year, the main one is to appreciate all facets of life; that struggle is just as important in the dance of humanity as joy. And if you're not embracing that, if you're rejecting the lessons the downsides of life have to offer, you're not fully living.

In lieu of a list of my favorite books, I'm sharing a few of my favorite quotes of the year. I hope you find a spark in them to send you off into 2025.

"Isn’t it always a happy moment when something good about the world isn’t wasted?"
My Year Abroad

"If you don’t put in the effort, you’re not going to receive much. And the discourse gets lowered, and everything gets a little more dumbed down and then that’s when the ruffians come in, and they’re the ones with energy and stupidity and then they can crush all the thoughtful people. That’s not good for culture, and that’s not good for humanity. We see the results of that all the time."
Willem Dafoe

"She sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should not be seen, as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past."
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch

"John Krasinski could be the sexiest man at an airport Panera. He could very well be the sexiest man on the campus of a small midwestern private university. He could be the sexiest man at a Pottery Barn outlet, getting a great deal on a big lamp. No, John Krasinski was not the sexiest man alive in 2024."
Hunter Harris

"A person who posted on Reddit’s r/nurses forum, whose profile describes her as an I.C.U. nurse, wrote, 'Honestly, I’m not wishing anyone harm, but when you’ve spent so much time and made so much money by increasing the suffering of the humanity around you, it’s hard for me to summon empathy that you died. I’m sure someone somewhere is sad about this. I am following his lead of indifference.' Reading this, I thought about the statistic, from 2018, that health-care workers account for seventy-three per cent of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence. Nurses, residents, aides, specialists—they are asked to absorb the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system, whose private insurers generate billions of dollars in profit and pay executives eight figures not despite but because of the fact that they routinely deny care to desperate people in need."
Jia Tolentino

"You have to oppose this motherfucker. You have to remember the Central Park Five. You have to remember the hundreds of thousands of people who died because he wouldn’t tell them to wear masks. You have to remember the vows to brutally deport millions of your neighbors. You have to remember the determination to allow the wholesale looting of the government by billionaire pals while simultaneously stepping on the necks of working people. You do not need to go to the White House Christmas party and smile at him and say you value bipartisanship. You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to him.

You need to punch this motherfucker in the face with your last bit of strength even as he piles the weight of the entire federal government on top of you. The political opposition in America is not fighting for itself right now—it is fighting for the millions and millions of working people and poor people and immigrants and women and others who are going to be oppressed more than usual beginning on January 21, 2025. The opposition is, right now, a minority. It is not in control. It is on the back foot. It is in a hard spot. And that is the time when you fight harder, or you take a knee. Don’t make the wrong choice."
Hamilton Nolan

xoxo,
Carla