Quotes About Impact

he smiled at her as though he had not with a single sentence blown the sane structure of her life into slithering fragments.

I'd rather live knowing I made a mistake than wondering if I could have made a difference if I'd tried.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with...

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.

Este crimen se impone como un espejo, y el monstruo que allí se refleja tiene la cara del país entero.

Así pasa con la letra escrita: aunque nadie la lea, basta con que esté ahí para que gravite como ley de bendición o condena.

Every little decision you made, every person you met could change your life, set it on a different course, or end it.

According to my mother, no book is only a book. A book can improve your mind or it can break it.

I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.

happiness research finds that small, frequent gestures have a greater impact on our overall well-being than bigger, infrequent events.

You can have a great system for organizing e-mail, or scheduling daily conference calls on various projects, but I'm guessing at your retirement dinner, people won't talk about your pristine in-box or packed schedule. They'll want to talk about what you've done. If you're not getting anything that matters done—like, say, lowering Vietnam's infant mortality rate—then you're not really working.

we become full people when we do things to change the world. The "problem that has no name," as Friedan called it, was that housework has never been particularly fulfilling to most people beyond the folks who decide to start their own cleaning businesses. You can dress it up all you want with fancy gadgets, but vacuuming a rug is still just vacuuming a rug … unless you imbue it with some larger purpose.

I hope someone will be lost without me someday.

Doesn't anyone realize that one 'touch', one 'time' will destroy a child's life ten times faster than a pack-a-day habit?

Well-behaved women rarely make history.

Well behaved women seldom make history.

Les femmes bien élevées entrent rarement dans l'histoire

Losing Bogey was horrible, obviously. Because he was young. And because he gave me my life. I wouldn't have had a -- I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't met him -- I would have had a completely different kind of life. He changed me, he gave me everything. And he was an extraordinary man.

Fifty years on, we're still watching her movies and talking about her. That's not a dumb woman – trust me!

People come and go, in and out of each other's lives like it's nothing. So I don't know how/why this should be a big deal.

He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolution.

What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.