Carol V > Carol's Quotes

“I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

"But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“That time always ends a second before you’re ready.

That life is the minutes you want minus one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Listen to me. Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast. You better live a good life.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They're like weeds, always finding their way up.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I remember you.” Three words, large enough to tip the world.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“history is something you look back on, not something you really feel at the time. In the moment, you're just... living.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Every day you live is a day for dreaming.
Every day is a day for adventuring.
And every day is for sharing with people you love,
because love's all that lasts.
It's the only thing we carry out of this world.
It connects us all, in the end.”
― Natalie Lloyd

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”
― Maya Angelou

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
― Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.

Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.

Their language has been lost.

But not the gestures.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Live. And Live Well.

BREATHE. Breathe in and Breathe deeply.

Be PRESENT. Do
not be past. Do not be future. Be now.

On a crystal clear, breezy 70 degree day,
roll down the windows and

FEEL the wind against your skin. Feel the warmth of
the sun.

If you run, then allow those first few breaths on a cool Autumn day to

FREEZE your lungs and do not just be alarmed, be ALIVE.

Get knee-deep in a novel
and LOSE track of time.

If you bike, pedal HARDER and if you crash then crash
well.

Feel the SATISFACTION of a job well done-a paper well-written, a project
thoroughly completed, a play well-performed.

If you must wipe the snot from your
3-year old's nose, don't be disgusted if the Kleenex didn't catch it all

because soon he'll be wiping his own.

If you've recently experienced loss, then
GRIEVE. And Grieve well.

At the table with friends and family, LAUGH.

If you're
eating and laughing at the same time, then might as well laugh until you puke.

And if you eat, then SMELL.

The aromas are not impediments to your day. Steak on
the grill, coffee beans freshly ground, cookies in the oven.

And TASTE.

Taste every ounce of flavor.

Taste every ounce of friendship.

Taste every ounce of Life.

Because-it-is-most-definitely-a-Gift.”
― Kyle Lake

“Imagine that the whole world belongs to you. The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's big island.

You own everything, my dear sovereign - the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the internet and the wild horses and the roads. Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility. And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you.”
― Rob Brezsny

“your art
is not about how many people
like your work
your art
is about
if your heart likes your work
if your soul likes your work
it's about how honest
you are with yourself
and you
must never
trade honesty
for relatability”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and honey

“Your children are the greatest gift God will give to you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility He will place in your hands. Take time with them, teach them to have faith in God. Be a person in whom they can have faith. When you are old, nothing else you've done will have mattered as much.”
― Lisa Wingate

“Deadlines just aren't real to me until I'm staring one in the face.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free”
― Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

“Who says you cannot hold the moon in your hand?

Tonight when the stars come out and the moon rises in the velvet sky, look outside your window, then raise your hand and position your fingers around the disk of light.

There you go . . . That was easy!”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Just because something is typed-whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book-this does not mean that it is true.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window

“I tell you of loss, my child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours. When you should happen to cry, then cry, knowing that just as easily you will laugh again and cry again. Your feelings will enter the currents of your core and there they shall remain”
― Thanhha Lai

“One must indeed test the strings to this life, bounce the bow, wet the mouthpiece, prepare for the deeper music that follows.”
― Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

“Do not waste....Don't waste the vegetable-washing water, splash it on the grapefruit tree instead....Don't waste anything made of glass or plastic because glass and plastic can be reused ad nauseam....Don't waste...a string for retying, a rubber band for conquering dry noodles or hair, rice bags for dishcloths, fish bones for fertilizer....Anything that comes out of the earth must be returned to the earth...."If everyone uses more than their share, how can the earth support us?"”
― Thanhha Lai

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

“I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.”
― Helen Keller

“You cannot write if you do not read,” the blind man said. “You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not”—he grabbed for the boy’s hand—“listen.”
― Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

“At a certain point, your life is more about your legacy to your kids than anything else.”
― Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

“Our character isn’t defined by the battles we win or lose, but by the battles we dare to fight.”
― Robert Beatty, Serafina and the Black Cloak