viola > viola's Quotes

“At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do.”
― Dave Eggers

“But that's one lifetime."
Yeah."
But while doing that one I'd want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives- the one where I sail-"
I know, on a boat you made yourself.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“That is why it could happen anywhere, given the right ingredients: particular people in government, competing with others- or with each other- over natural and wealth-creating resources.”
― Clea Koff, The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo

“Maybe I wanted to be crushed, too. To be ready you need to be tired, and you need to have seen a great deal, or what you consider to have been a great deal- we all have such different capacities, are able to absorb and sustain vastly different quantities of visions and pain- and at that moment I started thinking that I had seen enough, that in general I'd had my fill and that in terms of visual stimulation the week thus far has shown me enough and that I was sated. The rock-running in Senegal was enough, the kids and their bonjours- that alone would prepare me for the end; if I couldn't be thankful enough having been there I was sick and ungrateful, and I would not be ungrateful, not ever, I would always know the gifts given me, I would count them and keep them safe! I had had so much so I would be able to face the knife in the alley and accept it all, smiling serenely, thankful that I'd be taken while riding the very crest of everything. I had been on a plane! A tiny percentage of all those who'd ever lived would ever be on an airplane- and had seen Africa rushing at me like something alive and furious. I could be taken and eaten by these wet alleyways without protest.”
― Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

“There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated.”
― Dave Eggers

“I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Or is it just that the world upwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you're ready to see it anew?”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“That's all I want- to do no harm.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it effects everything we're connected to.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

“Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time.”
― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Ignore any loss of nerve, ignore any loss of self-confidence, ignore any doubt or confusion. Move on believing in love, in peace, and harmony, and in great accomplishment. Remember joy isn't a stranger to you. You are winning and you are strong. Love. Love first, love always, love forever.”
― Anne Rice

“For the first time in my life, I felt a gentleness, a softness in the unfolding of each day.”
― Han Nolan, Dancing on the Edge: A National Book Award-Winning YA Novel of Mental Health and Family Healing

“We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we’re at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call “freedom.”
― Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

“You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”
― Marcel Proust

“Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“For the time being
Words scatter
Are they fallen leaves?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I don't hate anybody.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“It is not true, what I said before, because I hated him. He was the war criminal, and after the war they hanged him. I was so happy I wept for joy when I heard he was dead. Then I shave my head and took the vow to stop hating.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings and make survey of the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it may be able to choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our knowledge of objects is enclosed.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Einstein leans over to Besso, who is also short, and says, "I want to understand time because I want to get close to The Old One.”
― Alan Lightman

“The pilgrims chant with every minute subtracted from their lives. This is their sacrifice.”
― Alan Lightman