Masha Gessen Quotes

Songs are more powerful than books.

And I haven't met too many actors along the way that haven't told me how much the show has meant to them. It's one of the reasons they say they are doing what they're doing, today.

One always hopes that you're going to have influence and staying power, but you never know.

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

My ultimate aim would be to captivate an audience, even just for a second.

When someone's really good at encapsulating human emotion and putting it out in a form that can reach a variety of people, that's going to have a big effect when he's no longer there.

The future is fluid. Each act, each decision, and each development creates new possibilities and eliminates others. The future is ours to direct.

When you say something, and a thousand people are hearing it, you hope you leave an impression.

No matter how much control you have or how much confidence, it's always in someone else's hands, all the time. That's the scariest thing about this industry. It's so political.

We write songs that hit different people at different ages where they live.

I think it's a mistake to try and overthink how you are going to be received, because that assumes that you are going to be received in the first place.

I strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do, and that is embody the human spirit.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that tonight that if it hadn't been for Eddie, I wouldn't have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.

I feel I have the potential to reach an audience beyond anything I can imagine.

As journalists, we need to find every avenue to distribute our work, and try to be so good that we become increasingly more influential than before.

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.

One is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen.

ONE OF THE UNSETTLING THINGS about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end.

I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.

What we love we shall grow to resemble.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same.

Life has more imagination than we do.

Possibility is far more frightening than impossibility.