Jocelyn > Jocelyn's Quotes

“Love your life. Because your life is what you have to give.”
― Tom Hiddleston

“For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.”
― Tom Hiddleston

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.”
― Tom Hiddleston

“It’s like, it doesn't honor God to pretend like everything is OK. That’s the beauty of Jesus that so many people miss. The beauty is that he died on the cross for our sins, but also that he existed the way we exist. He understands what it’s like to lose a friend. He’s not unfamiliar with those emotions. He’s not unfamiliar with the difficulty of human life. To me that’s what makes Jesus as God beautiful. He totally understands. He went out of his way to prove to us that he understands our situation. So when he has something to say, it’s not coming from this high and lofty standpoint. It’s coming from this person who understands intricately the perils of human existence.”
― John Mark McMillan

“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”
― Thich Nhat Hang, Stepping into Freedom: An Introduction to Buddhist Monastic Training

“I am never alone wherever I am. The air itself supplies me with a century of love. When I breathe in, I am breathing in the laughter, tears, victories, passions, thoughts, memories, existence, joys, moments, and the hues of the sunlight on many tones of skin; I am breathing in the same air that was exhaled by many before me. The air that bore them life. And so how can I ever say that I am alone?”
― C. JoyBell C.

“How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“It is a common belief that we breathe with our lungs alone, but in point of fact, the work of breathing is done by the whole body. The lungs play a passive role in the respiratory process. Their expansion is produced by an enlargement, mostly downward, of the thoracic cavity and they collapse when that cavity is reduced. Proper breathing involves the muscles of the head, neck, thorax, and abdomen. It can be shown that chronic tension in any part of the body's musculature interferes with the natural respiratory movements.
Breathing is a rhythmic activity. Normally a person at rest makes approximately 16 to 17 respiratory incursions a minute. The rate is higher in infants and in states of excitation. It is lower in sleep and in depressed persons. The depth of the respiratory wave is another factor which varies with emotional states. Breathing becomes shallow when we are frightened or anxious. It deepens with relaxation, pleasure and sleep. But above all, it is the quality of the respiratory movements that determines whether breathing is pleasurable or not. With each breath a wave can be seen to ascend and descend through the body. The inspiratory wave begins deep in the abdomen with a backward movement of the pelvis. This allows the belly to expand outward. The wave then moves upward as the rest of the body expands. The head moves very slightly forward to suck in the air while the nostrils dilate or the mouth opens. The expiratory wave begins in the upper part of the body and moves downward: the head drops back, the chest and abdomen collapse, and the pelvis rocks forward.
Breathing easily and fully is one of the basic pleasures of being alive. The pleasure is clearly experienced at the end of expiration when the descending wave fills the pelvis with a delicious sensation. In adults this sensation has a sexual quality, though it does not induce any genital feeling. The slight backward and forward movements of the pelvis, similar to the sexual movements, add to the pleasure. Though the rhythm of breathing is pronounced in the pelvic area, it is at the same time experienced by the total body as a feeling of fluidity, softness, lightness and excitement.
The importance of breathing need hardly be stressed. It provides the oxygen for the metabolic processes; literally it supports the fires of life. But breath as "pneuma" is also the spirit or soul. We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss. That is why breathing is the dominant factor in the practice of Yoga.”
― Alexander Lowen, The Voice of the Body

“We too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath.”
― Lawrence Binyon

“How to be a Poet

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity…

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
― Wendell Berry, Given

“I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.”
― Richard Nelson, Island Within

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and filled myself up with the breeze from the valley. Then I let it out slow so it could get back to its travels, with a little bit of me added to it.”
― Katherine Hannigan, Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World

“Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
― Edith Sitwell

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Hair is gray and the firers are burning. So many dreams on the shelf. You say I wanted you to be proud of me. I always wanted that myself.”
― Tori Amos

“A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people's legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.”
― Andrew Wyeth

“Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“I gave three quiet cheers for Minnesota. In Seattle a dusty inch of anything white and chilly means the city lapses into full-on panic mode, as if each falling flake crashes to earth with its own individual baggie of used hypodermic needles. It’s ridiculous.”
― Cherie Priest, Bloodshot

“March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.”
― L.M. Montgomery

“Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“You can't just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.”
― Joseph Delaney, Night of the Soul Stealer

“We do what we have to so we can do what we want to”
― James Farmer

“When it's finals week and you've been studying for five hours straight, you need three things to get you through the nigh.The biggest Slurpee you can find,half cherry half Coke.Pajama pants, the kind that have been washed so many times they are tissue-paper thin. And finally,dance breaks. Lots of dance breaks.”
― Jenny Han, We'll Always Have Summer