Lauren > Lauren 's Quotes

“Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation

“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.”
― Vandana Shiva

“He preferred smart questions to smart answers.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“My little old dog
a heart-beat
at my feet”
― Edith Wharton

“Once I learned to read, I could not imagine my life otherwise.”
― Keith Donohue

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
― Diane Ackerman

“Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.”
― Wade Davis

“In the end, just three things matter:

How well we have lived
How well we have loved
How well we have learned to let go”
― Jack Kornfield

“What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?” “It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Relearn astonishment.”
― Elias Canetti

“It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
― Mary Oliver, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

“You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she’d shout into it and no one would hear her. That’s Facebook.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“A clever mind is not a heart. Knowledge doesn't really care, wisdom does.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

“Lots of people talk to animals...Not very many listen though...that's the problem.”
― A.A. Milne

“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
― John Muir

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There