my current favorites:
“Someone I loved gave me/ a box full of darkness./ It took me years to understand/ that this, too, was a gift.” / Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you’re burping up apple fritters and Cheetos. / Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually)
Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home. / Gwendolyn Brooks
Where is the Life we have lost in living? / T.S. Eliot
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” / Howard Thurman.
“I must learn to love the fool in me — the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled materful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool.” / Theodore I. Rubin, MD
note:
i eat these words and feel full and find energy to keep going … (i don’t believe this page is available on search engines, and i don’t publicize it. these quotes are here as a source of inspiration in my own work and life. if anyone feels there is a violation of copyright, let me know and i’ll make the page a private page for personal use.)
VIDEOS
beating the little hater (thanks to design your writing life for the link)
AUTHENTICITY, STRENGTH, BRAVERY
“It is always a wild ride, whoever you are, to be true to what you know in your heart.” / Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life
“It’s better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.” / The Bhagavad Gita, ancient Indian yogic text
“Be courageous, bizarre; be crazy/ I don’t mean roll into the aisles,’ but be on another planet; walk on/ stilts from here to Peru/ This isn’t like math; there’s/ never a right answer.” / Lyn Lifshin
“Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” / The Buddha
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” / Pablo Picasso
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold/ your own myth … ” / Rumi
“[Life] is demanding of me, ‘Start again. Begin new things. Again set to work to build your world.” / Jean Toomer
“Go within every day and find the inner strength so that the world will not blow your candle out.” / Katherine Dunham
“It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream.” / Benjamin Mays
“We are here, charged with the task of completing (one might say creating) ourselves.” / William Cook
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” / Ernest Hemingway
“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” / The Buddha, c. 563-483 bce
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” / Anais Nin (1903-77)
“Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear.” / Marcus Aurelius (121-80), Roman emperor
“Dig inside. Inside is the fountain of good, and it will forever flow, if you will forever dig.” / Marcus Aurelius (121-80), Roman emperor
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” / Seneca (c. 4bce-c. 65 bce), Rome
“Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.” / Frederick Wilcox
“I believe all that weird stuff because I was built to believe in weird stuff. Other people run races because they were built to run fast, or play basketball because God made them six-foot-ten, or solve long, complicated equations on black boards because they were built to see the places where the numbers lock together.” / Stephen King , Intro to Nightmares and Dreamscapes
“We do not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” / Andre Gide (1869-1951), France
FOR FUN
“A frog never drinks. It sucks to be a frog.” / Snapple Real Fact #110
“I drink because I’m a sensitive and highly-strung person.” / Goldie Hawn’s character in First Wives Club
“Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.” / Katharine Hepburn
“Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one. Every day from here to there, funny things are everywhere.” / Dr. Seuss in ONE FISH. TWO FISH. RED FISH. BLUE FISH.
“If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?” / Linda Ellerbee
“No matter what, I’m glad I came with you.” / Geena Davis’ character in Thelma & Louise
“I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.” / Zsa Zsa Gabor
FRIENDSHIP
“Every close friendship offers the same fundamental thrill; someone has singled you out and chosen you, someone who had no obligation to do so.” / Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell
HAPPINESS
“I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. … You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.” / Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love
“Happiness and sadness don’t come from outside; they come from one’s own mind.” / Buddhist teacher Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche
“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a great tree in the midst of them all.” / Achaan Chaa (d. 1992), Thailand
“Walking in peace and beauty is never a waste of time.” / Louise Dickinson Rich in All this and fishing, too
IMAGINATION
“There is no use trying,” said Alice; “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” / Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
MOTHERHOOD
from Robin Bradford’s “Becoming a boy” essay in the book: It’s a boy! –
“Being around boys is like observing a miniature tornado. The air boys breathe seems laced with something different than enything I ever knew. They inhale entitlement and energy and exhale exuberance and explosiveness.”
“As a girl, I grew up learning to hid the fierceness of my appetites. As the mother of a boy, I’ve learned to assert my desires, chase what I want and hit a backyard homerun.”
“The world of boys is a rough, exotic country.”
“I can’t help watching these boys move through the world. … I watch them with the intensity of a girl in love.”
“As green-headed ducks drift by and the sun glints blades onto the water and three boys with their pants rolled to their knees balance on mossy stones, I step in deeper and cringe. A boy can do that to you.”
Anne Lamott in “Mother Anger: Theory and practice” from Mothers who think –
“When you mention these feelings to other mothers, they all say, ‘Yes, yes!’ You ask, ‘Are you ever mean to your children?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Do you every yell so that it scares you?’ ‘Yes,yes!’ ‘Do you ever want to throw yourself down the back stairs because you’re so bored with your children that you can’t see straight?’ ‘Yes, Lord, yes. Thank you. Thank you. …’ If regular people saw your secret angry inside self, they’d draw back when they saw you coming. They would see you for what you are–human, flawed, more nuts than had been hoped–and they would probbably not want to hire or date you.”
re: kids “They’re so unreasonable and capable of such meanness that you’re stunned and grief-stricken about how much harder it is than you could have imagined. All you’re aware of is the big, windy gap between you and your lack of anything left to give.”
“Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn’t. Shame doesn’t. Being heard does. When I talk ab out it, I don’t feel so afraid. the fear is the worst part, the fear about who you secretly think you are, the fear you see in your child’s eyes.”
“Magazines, web sites and books for parents seem on a desperate mission to wrestle child-rearing into chirpy 12-step guides and 10-best lists, as if the complicated range of dramas and emotions that really defines motherhood were a wound best not probed too deeply. … Some mothers abandon their children. Others cripple them by holding them too close. Nearly all mothers discover the unnerving helplessness in the face of the passions motherhood arises. … We believe that raising children requires us to look squarely at both the dark and the light.” / Camille Peri and Kate Moses in the introduction to Mothers Who Think
SPIRITUALITY
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” / C.S. Lewis
“Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra. … The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. The Yogis … say … we have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternaly at peace.” / Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Love
“I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty. I laugh when I hear that men go on pilgrimage to find God.” / Kabir, 15th century India
“You are a child of the Universe, no less than the moon and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.” / Max Erhmann (1872-1945), United States
WISDOM
“The years teach much which the days never know.” / Ralph Waldo Emerson
WRITING/STORY/POETRY/FILM
“If I don’t have red, I use blue.” / Pablo Picasso
“None of it happened, and yet every word of it is true.” / Grace Paley
“The Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by fourr invisible brothers, who come into the world with us and protect us throughout our lives. … The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven.” / Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love
“It’s the poet inside of me who knows how to live.” / Poet Kalli Dakos
“Poetry names the secrets you didn’t know you were keeping. So surprise yourself. Follow one wild line after another.” / Robert Farnsworth
“Dazzle me with clarity.” / Poet Cathy Smith Bowers
“The real story comes from a love-source that cannot be understood with intellect, but known only as a person is known. It is not meant to be explicated but felt as music, as presence. These illuminations are a dliberate attempt to slow our pace down, to find a sacred space where this can happen. Listen with what Rumi called, ‘The ear in the center of the chest.’ ‘Hear,’ he begs us. ‘Hear what’s behind what I say …’.” / Coleman Barks (poet, translator, editor) in Introduction to A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” / Stephen King in On Writing
“Artists hear what no one else hears. They see what no one else sees. They say what no one else says. They must. And to do this, they traffic in the slippery yield of their own souls. They bring to earth the wrack and lode of depths that only they can reach and still come back alive.” / Anneli Rufus in Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto
“The literature of women’s lives is a tradition of escapes, women who have lived to tell the tale. They resist captivity. They get up and go. They seek better worlds.” / Phyllis Rose (as quoted by S.B. in Something More)
“The way we tell our life story is the way we begin to live our life.” / Maureen Murdock
“Always, always we were becoming a story. But I didn’t understand that fusing my life to the narrative, giving myself to the story’s life, would be what would allow me to live.” / Mark Doty
