Julia > Julia's Quotes

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Potential has a shelf life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”
― Margaret Atwood

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Never pray for justice, because you might get some.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.”
― Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder

“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”
― Margaret Atwood

“A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.”
― Margaret Atwood

“How were we to know we were happy?”
― Margaret Atwood

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Sometimes the only way to ever find yourself is to get completely lost.”
― Kellie Elmore

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“Action expresses priorities.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“What if religion was each other? If our practice was our life? If prayer was our words? What if the temple was the Earth? If forests were our church? If holy water - the rivers, lakes, and oceans? What if meditation was our relationships? If the Teacher was life? If wisdom was knowledge? If love was the center of our being.”
― Ganga White

“There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Magic

“Never allow dogmatic interpretations of Karma to keep you from defending what is right or just. You must accept the reality that on occasion, you may very well be the proper instrument of this cosmic force.”
― Gary Hopkins

“Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.”
― Ivan Illich

“Sometimes our walls exist just to see who has the strength to knock
them down.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker, Creep

“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Saint Anthony said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“You have been to hell, Ketut?"
He smiled. Of course he's been there.
What's it like in hell?"
Same like in heaven," he said.
He saw my confusion and tried to explain. "Universe is a circle, Liss."
He said. "To up, to down -- all same, at end."
I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below.
I asked. "Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?"
Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss." He laughed.
Same-same," he said. "Same in end, so better to be happy in journey."
I said, "So, if heaven is love, then hell is.. "
Love, too," he said.
Ketut laughed again, "Always so difficult for young people to understand this!”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. 'How much do you love me?' And, 'Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert , Eat, Pray, Love

“Everyone makes their own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita - and ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life perfectly. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. It is mine.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince