July 2023 collected quotes

"To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it."

- Natasha Trethewey

*

"Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t."

- Theodore Roethke

*

"Travelling is a fool's paradise."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

*

“Don’t break the window before you look at the view.”

-William Logan

*

"There’s a reason, after all, the CIA uses time and repetition to torture people."

- Richard Dawkins

*

"Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone."

-Czeslaw Milosz

*

"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

- Sylvia Plath

*

"They were sitting in the conference room with rolled-up sleeves trying to be geniuses."

- Jo Nesbo (The Bat)

*

“How do you plan a rebirth? I’m not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can’t endure it any longer, and then you move forward until you’re standing in the light."

Questlove

*

"The more I like me, the less I want to pretend to be other people."

- Jamie Lee Curtis

*

"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."

- Mark Twain

*

"My own opinion is really important to me. It starts and stops there."

- Lana Del Rey

*

"Old money runs the big charity events, new money gets to donate."

- Anonymous

*

"Musicians don't retire—they stop when there's no more music in them."

- Louis Armstrong

*

“I make so many beginnings there never will be an end.”

- Louisa May Alcott

*

"Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in."

- Haruki Murakami

*

"The changes we dread most may contain our salvation."

- Barbara Kingsolver

*

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

- James Baldwin

*

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."

- Joan Didion

*

"Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for a change."

- Goethe

*

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future."

- Eric Hoffer

*

"There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law."

- Edward Snowden

*

"Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught."

Ai Weiwei

*

"A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time."

Patrick Geddes

"As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach."

Albert Camus

*

"All great art is born of the metropolis."

Ezra Pound

*

"The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom."

- Lady Bird Johnson

*

"One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation."

- Arthur Ashe

*

"We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full."

-Marcel Proust

*

"There’s a reason, after all, the CIA uses time and repetition to torture people."

- Richard Dawkins

*

"Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone."

-Czeslaw Milosz

*

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. -Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

"As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch."

-Edith Wharton

*

"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country ... and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level -- I mean the wages of decent living."

-Franklin D. Roosevelt

*

"To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged."

-Norman Mailer

*

"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."

-George Jean Nathan

*

"Architecture is inhabited sculpture."

-Constantin Brancusi

*

"I would rather serve as a laborer to a serf, to a landless man who has no great livelihood, than rule all the perished dead"

- Achilles (Homer, The Odyssey)

vs.

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven"

- Lucifer (Milton, Paradise Lost)

*

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."

-John Cage

*

"In other words, if you don’t want some type of payback, your emotion is something else (grief, perhaps), but not really anger."

"There is one, and I think only one, situation in which the payback idea does make sense. That is when I see the wrong as entirely and only what Aristotle calls a ‘down-ranking’: a personal humiliation, seen as entirely about relative status. If the problem is not the injustice itself, but the way it has affected my ranking in the social hierarchy, then I really can achieve something by humiliating the wrongdoer: by putting him relatively lower, I put myself relatively higher, and if status is all I care about, I don’t need to worry that the real wellbeing problems created by the wrongful act have not been solved."

- Martha C Nussbaum (Beyond Anger)

*

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

- David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing...)

*

"People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within."

-Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

*

“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.”

- Dorothea Lange

*

"If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."

-Thomas Hardy

*

"'Writing' is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound."

- Lawrence Lessig

*

"There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world, I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary, and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair, and disrespect."

- Nikki Giovanni

*

"The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style."

- Fred Astaire

*

“Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.”

- Sholem Aleichem

*

“No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.”

- Sholem Aleichem

*

“I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.”

- Howard Nemerov

*

"Rereading seems to be what I’m doing lately, I don’t know why; maybe because it’s winter."

- James Longenbach

*

"Every writer has to find her own danger."

- Rosanna Warren

*

"What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams."

- Nikos Kazantzakis

*

"Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."

- Joseph Addison

*

"When you turn the corner / And you run into yourself / Then you know that you have turned / All the corners that are left."

- Langston Hughes

*

"Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something."

- Anton Chekhov

*

"And deeper yet down to the earth-dark root"

- Robert Francis (from his poem "Statement")

*

"One of the defining characteristics of a metaphor, of course, is that it breaks down fairly soon. You know, only up to a point ..."

&

"The ideal way to experience a poem is a combination of being able to read it and being about to hear it."

- Paul Muldoon (On Being with Krista Tippett, 2015)

*

"Only emotion endures."

- Ezra Pound

*

"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."

- Federico Fellini

*

"If triangles had a God, he would have three sides."

- Charles de Montesquieu

*

“Verbal charm is a lot of the game.”

- George Saunders on New Yorker Fiction Podcast (Oct. 2014)

*

"Won't you please tell me why faith bestows power?"

- Asgeir

*

"Nothing is worth more than laughter."

- Frida Kahlo

*

"The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny."

- Wole Soyinka

*

"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me."

- Audre Lorde

"If I could define enlightenment briefly I would say it is “the quiet acceptance of what is.”

- Wayne Dyer

*

"Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it."

- Jack Kornfield

*

"The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance."

- Nathaniel Branden

*

"Diligence is the mother of good fortune."

- Miguel de Cervantes

*

"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life."

- Beethoven

*

"Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart."

– Mahatma Gandhi

*

"I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going."

- Maya Angelou

*

"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness."

- Alexis de Tocqueville

*

“We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.”

- Shirley Chishol

*

"We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full."

-Marcel Proust

*

"There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free."

- Walter Cronkite

*

"We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced."

- Malala Yousafzai

*

"I am not interested in the past, except as the road to the future."

- Gianni Versace

*

"It always seems impossible until it's done."

- Nelson Mandela

*

"We live, not as we wish to, but as we can."

- Menander

*

"A bad end comes from a bad beginning."

- Euripides

*

"I have learned from the best of all teachers, experience."

- Pliny the Younger

*

"No one’s wholly corrupted overnight."

- Juvenal

*

"Our life's journey is really about the people who touch us."

- Stuart Scott

*

"We all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are."

- Fred Rogers

*

"There’s no shame in failing. The only shame is not giving things your best shot."

- Robin Williams

*

"The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without."

-Ernest Hemingway

*

"We love to expect; and, when expectation is disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting."

- Samuel Johnson

Note: Sounds like early thinking on the hedonic treadmill.

*

"Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation."

- Charlotte Brontë

*

"To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect."

- Joan Didion

*

"I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine."

- Bruce Lee

*

"No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable."

- David Foster Wallace

*

"I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship."

- Louisa May Alcott

*

" Happiness lies in moments, and while you have it you’re not even aware; only afterwards do you know you were happy."

- Luise Rainer

*

"When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things — not the great occasions — that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness."

- Bob Hope

*

"My philosophy is to live in the now — yesterday is gone, you don’t know if there’s even going to be a tomorrow, so you might as well enjoy today."

- Iris Apfel

*

"One must take what comes, with laughter."

- Olivia de Havilland

*

"If you try to be kind to people, you’ll be on the road to a good life."

- George Dunn

*

"The trick in life is learning how to deal with it."

- Dame Helen Mirren

*

"When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we’re not alone."

- Fred Rogers

*

"We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world."

- Gabor Maté

*

"As every therapist will tell you, healing involves discomfort — but so does refusing to heal. And, over time, refusing to heal is always more painful."

- Resmaa Menakem

*

"You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them."

- Maya Angelou

*

"Trauma is like grief. You can be fine for four or five years, then it comes back and hits you like it happened the day before. But then you can heal, you can find ways to love yourself, to be a valid member of society, to give back."

- Samantha Morton

*

"So many people with trauma feel like they’re failing because they have a bad day or a bad week or a bad year. And you know what? If you wake up, you’re not failing. If you brush your teeth, you’re not failing."

- Roxane Gay

*

"Very often, “what happened” takes years to reveal itself. It takes courage to confront our actions, peel back the layers of trauma in our lives, and expose the raw truth of our past. But this is where healing begins."

- Oprah

*

"One of the hardest things was learning I was worth recovery."

- Demi Lovato

*

"I’ve been searching for ways to heal myself, and I’ve found that kindness is the best way."

- Lady Gaga

*

"Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us — in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion."

- Sharon Salzberg

*

"If you haven't got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble."

- Bob Hope

*

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

Andy Warhol

*

“We can choose to be hopeful, try and possibly fail or not be hopeful, give up and definitely fail.”

- David Hogg

*

"There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet."

– Eric Hoffer

*

"Being President is like running a cemetery; you’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody’s listening."

- Bill Clinton

*

"These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be."

- Barack Obama

*

"One man can make a difference and every man should try."

- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

*

"I can't say I've loved you all, either... but I've loved as many of you as I could."

- Captain Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda)

*

"Listen, when you're in love, you're always in trouble. There's only two things you can do about it — either stop loving them, or love them a whole lot more."

- Colonel Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan)

*

"Frank, you know what a hero is? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he's somebody who's tired enough and cold enough and hungry enough not to give a damn. I don't give a damn."

- Captain Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda)

*

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

- Herman Melville

*