Top 40 Marie Benedict Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Changing your name is easy. Changing your soul is impossible.”

— Marie Benedict

2. “But I had stared the leaders of our enemies in the eyes and turned my ear to their voices, and I knew the terror they meant to wreak upon our world.”

— Marie Benedict

3. “Together we are saving the past for the future. With my fortune and your gifted eye and hard work, we are rescuing and protecting the most beautiful and important treasures that history has to offer – those artifacts and manuscripts that memorialize the physical history of the book.”

— Marie Benedict

4. “I still believe. I still believe that someday there will be equality in this country. That someday there will be a new civil rights act, and a new president and Congress to enforce it. That everyone will be able to follow their dream, regardless of race. That those words about the equality of men in the Declaration of Independence will be true.”

— Marie Benedict

5. “Andra, you know what they say. Any fool can earn money, but it takes a wise man to keep it.”

— Marie Benedict

6. “In order to assimilate with this crowd, I must be bold, daring to hide my differences in plain sight.”

— Marie Benedict

7. “We’re all pretending in this life, one way or another.”

— Marie Benedict

8. “My plan is to turn the Pierpont Morgan Library from a private library into a public institution so that thousands and thousands of people will see the beauty and significance of the early written word – the importance of reading and books as a great equalizer among humankind.”

— Marie Benedict

9. “I can not describe to you the impact that library had on my life and my success. It quite literally made me who I am today.”

— Marie Benedict

10. “The tie between parent and child is unbreakable, despite the sort of relationship they actually shared.”

— Marie Benedict

11. “Castles designed not for a medieval siege but for life. A privileged life, that was.”

— Marie Benedict

12. “Rulers and movements may rise and fall, but the power of money always prevails,” Fritz said. While ostensibly a summary of some facet of Napoleonic history, it seemed a fitting statement of Fritz’s own political beliefs. Power, it seemed, was an end unto itself for Fritz.”

— Marie Benedict

13. “That we should not be defined by how many drops of African blood run in our veins, but.”

— Marie Benedict

14. “The deeper we each read, the more we would understand about this world.”

— Marie Benedict

15. “As I said before, I settle for only what I think I’m worth. And if I do not ask, you will not give.”

— Marie Benedict

16. “From this experience, I learned that when you’ve gone astray, a helping hand will always emerge from the darkness.”

— Marie Benedict

17. “I was like an antenna seeking out sounds no one else could hear. Silent harbingers of doom.”

— Marie Benedict

18. “My afternoons with him were the only moments of authenticity in a world brimming with artifice. Minutes where I could build a pathway to hope.”

— Marie Benedict

19. “Segregation is really just slavery by another name, lynching is one of its proponents’ weapons, and we would be subjected to segregation and threatened by lynchings if we lived as colored anywhere in this country.”

— Marie Benedict

20. “I was invited. And even though I anticipated their reaction, their racism isn’t my problem. Racism belongs to the people who are racists.”

— Marie Benedict

21. “This moment in time, shimmering and blissful, was hard to relinquish.”

— Marie Benedict

22. “Stand Your Ground by Victoria Christopher Murray. In.”

— Marie Benedict

23. “One day, Belle, we will be able to reach back through the decades and claim you as one of our own. Your accomplishments will be part of history; they’ll show doubtful white people what colored people can do. Until that time, live your life proudly.”

— Marie Benedict

24. “Never apologize for intellectual curiosity or the appreciation of fine art, Miss Greene.”

— Marie Benedict

25. “The rich Renaissance artwork, with its freshly hewn three-dimensionality and deep allegorical meaning, transported me away from myself and my reality to a time and place where true genius was possible, a time like and yet unlike our own. And I knew I had to help transport others in turn. That’s why I first began writing.”

— Marie Benedict

26. “Andrew Carnegie, who is the man who built this free library and thousands more libraries with his own money. A man who gave the gift of books and education to every person, regardless of how much money they had.”

— Marie Benedict

27. “Her quietude was not weakness; it was an ardent watchfulness that would be replaced by a roar when required.”

— Marie Benedict

28. “Over the years, my memories of that trip – our hikes along paths lined with pine trees and vivid sprigs of wildflowers and the sound of my parents’ laughter echoing through the forest as they strolled hand in hand – had not faded.”

— Marie Benedict

29. “You and I are not so different except in the choices we’ve made. And remind yourself that a new choice is always possible.”

— Marie Benedict

30. “In comparison to them and countless others, I had no right to suffer. But suffering came whether or not I was worthy.”

— Marie Benedict

31. “You are a lady, Miss Kelley. No other woman of my acquaintance is as graceful in her demeanor or as elegant in her thinking.”

— Marie Benedict

32. “What is it about a crisis that draws us closer to our loved ones? Why do the differences between us – minuscule and vast – seem to disappear against the backdrop of mounting catastrophe?”

— Marie Benedict

33. “I knew no one in Dublin. But the other Clara Kelley certainly did. That letter could only be for her.”

— Marie Benedict

34. “Mitza, you are like the objects in one of Newton’s investigations. You tirelessly maintain your velocity through life unless you are acted upon by an outside force. I hope no outside force ever changes your velocity.” Papa.”

— Marie Benedict

35. “But I promise myself – and them – now that I have authored an authentic self into existence, I will write a perfect ending.”

— Marie Benedict

36. “Do you remember the first time you realized that you were different from other girls? Smarter perhaps?” Helene asked. I.”

— Marie Benedict

37. “Friends did matter. Friends like these anyway, ones who were fiercely intelligent and similarly ambitious, who suffered through the same sort of ridicule and condemnation and survived, smiling.”

— Marie Benedict

38. “The world of physics was where I belonged. Embedded in its secretive rules about the workings of the world – hidden forces and unseen causal relationships so complex that I believed only God could have created them – were answers to the greatest questions about our existence. If only I could uncover them.”

— Marie Benedict

39. “Together, we will become the ideal bohemian couple – equal in love and work.” “Truly?”

— Marie Benedict

40. “Mama had indeed risen up with a ferocity I didn’t think she possessed. I’d been wrong about her my whole life. Her quietude was not weakness; it was an ardent watchfulness that would be replaced by a roar when required.”

— Marie Benedict

41. “This woman, defined by her skin, the shade of a new penny, and by the debilitating laws of segregation dividing our country and our people into two halves, seems proud that one of her own has wriggled free from the restraints still inflicted upon some, like the chains that bound our ancestors.”

— Marie Benedict

42. “Perhaps this was mankind’s fate – to learn that none of our paths were as straight as we believed they would be.”

— Marie Benedict

43. “You must never apologize for a sin someone else has committed,” she says with a shake of her head.”

— Marie Benedict

44. “I simply recall a dark hollow within me into which I crawled when the anxiety overwhelmed.”

— Marie Benedict

45. “The risks of the conflict never overwhelmed me, only the fear of marginalization.”

— Marie Benedict

46. “Part of the struggle to make change is the struggle to get the right change-makers in place.”

— Marie Benedict