Tania Kindersley > Quotes

“You see? That's the point. It's all a big guess. They hope, they pray, they cook and garden and get a better job to pay the mortgage and read dirty books to keep bedtime interesting, but they don't know. There are no guarantees. Sometimes you just stop loving someone. You just stop.”
― Tania Kindersley, Goodbye, Johnny Thunders

“I sometimes think we should go back to the old days, when there was proper courtship, when people walked out together for weeks and weeks before anything happened. At least then you know something about each other, you have some solid ground to put your feet on. We're all so impatient now, we just want to get to the main action.”
― Tania Kindersley, Goodbye, Johnny Thunders

“It comes to us all. The moment when you realise that nothing but love will do.”
― Tania Kindersley, Goodbye, Johnny Thunders

“What I didn't know then was that you can't make people different, whatever you do. They have to do it themselves.”
― Tania Kindersley, Goodbye, Johnny Thunders

“Csíkszentmihályi, a very brilliant psychologist, believed that what he called Flow was a state of complete absorption which produced the highest level of human happiness. It comes about when you are doing something which is difficult enough to require all your concentration and effort and skill, but not so hard that it defeats you. Because that activity takes everything you have got, you have no time to think about all the existential flies that swarm about your head. You can’t worry about money or love or death or taxes; you are simply thinking about this thing. You are your best, most authentic self. He said that, in this state of Flow, a person is ‘completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.’ He then got a little technical. There are, apparently, nine crucial states of achieving Flow, which include: ‘challenge-skill balance, merging of action and awareness, clarity of goals, immediate and unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, transformation of time, loss of self-consciousness, and autotelic experience.”
― Tania Kindersley, The Happy Horse: An Amateur's Guide To Being The Human Your Horse Deserves

“I see that,' I said. I thought I did. 'But every case is different. And anyway, you can't learn from other people's mistakes.'
'Not unless you're very clever,' said Dexter sadly.”
― Tania Kindersley, Goodbye, Johnny Thunders

“You don’t have to have a lifetime of experience; you don’t have to be a natural; you don’t have to be a perfect expert. You can be like me, and learn this good stuff as you go along. You can make mistakes and have moments of dark despair and sometimes want to give up. And then you can keep on learning, keep on trying, keep on reaching, and you will find your moments of glad grace and catch a glimpse of those mountain peaks. I”
― Tania Kindersley, The Happy Horse: An Amateur's Guide To Being The Human Your Horse Deserves

“An accountant is always going to be an accountant, but a bad boy, now there's a challenge. If you love him enough, you might make him good. And this dangerous myth keeps its credence because some bad boys do turn good, after all. The problem is, no-one notices that the ones who change were just good boys pretending to be bad. They don't change, they revert. The leopard, he don't change his spots, but the sheep in in wolf's clothing, he can put on a new jacket and everyone goes all misty-eyed and talks about what love can do.”
― Tania Kindersley, Goodbye, Johnny Thunders