Dinners With Ruth: A Memoir On The Power Of Friendships Quotes
"Friends play a unique role in our lives."
"Friends can sometimes do things for you that your own family cannot."
"Friendship is also reciprocal. Reach out to your own friends when they are in need, and you will be rewarded many times over."
"In a very real sense, friendship became the Old Girl Network."
"Part of what made my father a master was hunger, not the metaphorical kind, the real kind."
"My mother, Melanie, had a very different life story."
"Ruth’s early years were very different from mine."
"The question is: Do I want this enough? If the answer is yes, I find a way."
"Ruth, smart as she was—she attended Cornell on a scholarship—recognized the prevailing social landscape."
"The attitude to sexual harassment was simply ‘Get past it. Boys will be boys.’"
"Women covering a presidential primary campaign were a rarity."
"The year 1971 was a watershed for Ruth Bader Ginsburg—and for me."
"I was also completely in over my head. I knew nothing."
"The most successful way to get ahead was often to pretend otherwise."
"For women of my generation, getting the first job was the big hurdle."
"It was only after I had walked out of the room that I realized I might also have to support a family someday."
"Life is in its own way a performance, and she was prepared to command the stage."
"I was reasonably sure Rockefeller would win, but I was wrong."
"The Supreme Court: The Last Plantation."
"This is not the business of the government. This is a choice that people ought to be able to make."
"We were both chronically busy women and taking time for shopping was a rarity, but also a necessity."
"Even today, the Supreme Court is enough of a monastery that it pays to know the justices even a little bit to pierce the veil of secrecy that pervades the place."
"Justice Powell, for instance, once described the justices as operating 'like nine different law firms.'"
"In retrospect, it’s possible to make multiple arguments: that Washington was too chummy or that it was simply friendlier and more collegial."
"But there’s another facet of these relationships, on all sides, that no one should confuse: objectivity and fairness are not the same thing."
"Nobody is purely objective. It is not possible. What all of us are capable of is fairness."
"If you were a woman, you were always fighting to get a chance. The workplace was not a haven."
"The women at NPR treated each other differently... there was no time, energy, or inclination for competition."
"I knew nothing about radio, but I was thrilled with what I saw at NPR. I was eager and willing to learn, and there was a lot to learn."
"When you fall in love, you feel as if you are walking on air. Even if no one else seems to have noticed, you feel special."
"He didn’t have patience for lobbyists who came asking for favors for undeserving corporate clients, and he was willing to take an unpopular position if he thought it was right."
"I became a more sympathetic partner. During that first year of marriage, Floyd and I both became better partners."
"We, most of us, may be born with an innate desire for friendship, companionship, and love, but being good at any of those things takes work."
"When you come to a crisis in life, I think you will find that doing your duty will serve you rather well, whether it is your crisis or someone else’s."
"I understood her job. More than two decades of covering the federal court system had given me a special insight into the institutions where she worked."
"I had never been entirely responsible for arranging a funeral, and Cokie had arranged plenty. She knew which chapel to request at the National Cathedral, who to talk to, and what questions to resolve about the service."
"If there was a mother superior of the group, it was Cokie. At one point Floyd was holding steady, so I flew to Oklahoma to report for Nightline."
"I will not be a party to this effort, even if it costs me my liberty."
"I’ll guarantee there’ll be blood on the walls of the committee room."
"Do not stand there at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep."
"Some things are more important than votes."
"We’re talking about an effect upon millions of people and the way they live their everyday life and the way they’re treated in their neighborhood, in their schools, in their jobs."
"I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight."
"I am the soft star that shines at night."
"One of the advantages of living so long is that when you can play very well at a very young age, the audience screams and yells, and when you are very old and can still do it, they scream and yell."
"We have a wonderful time together, even if we are just doing dishes while we talk."
"I can honestly say I’ve never been at a more joyous wedding."
"Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office."
"I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president."
"I was in pretty bad shape. Marty said I looked like a survivor of Auschwitz, and I had to do something to build myself up."
"I’m now eighty-five. My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was ninety, so I think I have about at least five more years."
"That’s good. And have you gone back to your trainer, Bryant Johnson?"
"At different moments in life, there are choices of lasting consequence. And I had one of those before me. For the next eighteen months, I chose friendship. It was the best choice I ever made."
"Ruth weathered the surgery and went straight back to work, but her doctors told her to cancel all her engagements. No speeches, no travel."
"She told me that she missed Marty every day, especially now."
"Her response to three cancer diagnoses was to follow the advice of the opera singer Marilyn Horne, who when asked about her pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2005 had said, ‘I will live,’ not that ‘I hope I live,’ or ‘I want to live,’ but ‘I will live.’"
"The work is really what saved me, because I had to concentrate on reading the briefs, doing a draft of an opinion, and I knew I had to get it done."
"Justice Ginsburg will continue to have periodic blood tests and scans. No further treatment is needed at this time."
"The court has no troops at its command. ItItIt doesn’t have the power of the purse, and yet time and again, when the courts say something, people accept it."
"Ruth believed deeply in that mission—to uphold the Court’s public trust."
"The country knew her as this always polite political reporter, willing to ask the impolitic question if necessary—this funny, wise, smart woman, who could write circles around most reporters."
"To know Cokie was to see the personification of human decency."
"I had watched my mother go, then Floyd, then, after a hiatus, my father, Cokie, and so many others."
"But for the final year of Ruth’s life, I want to focus on just that: her life."
"She came home and took a nap. Beth was not sure that Ruth would have the strength to get out of bed and come downstairs, she was so frail. But suddenly, quite a bit later than the appointed hour, there was Ruth, her thin legs carefully picking their way down the staircase."
"I wear the necklace whenever I am feeling stupid, and think I need a dose of brains to help me write."
"It is as if the house expects her to come back. As if I do."