Hannah Young > Hannah's Quotes

“Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“One day can change your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is three or four big days that change everything.”
― Beverly Donofrio

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed."

"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self."

"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God. This is man's greatest tragedy and God's heaviest grief.”
― A. W. Tozer

“The search for Jesus is about reconciling loss and tragedy to God and us.”
― W. Scott Lineberry

“The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
― Terri Garey

“The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him while he lives.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.”
― Roland Merullo, A Little Love Story

“When someone so young and lovely vanishes they leave a cutout in the atmosphere; they don't fade. They leave a place for the sun rays to cut through and burn us, melt all the important ice to floods.”
― Francesca Lia Block, The Elementals

“Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.

Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.”
― David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants: Essays and Prose

“In a world plagued with commonplace tragedies, only one thing exists that truly has the power to save lives, and that is love.”
― Richelle Goodrich, Dandelions: The Disappearance of Annabelle Fancher

“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.”
― Dorothy Allison

“People know your tragedies and they treat you like
you’re not human. Like you’re a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain.
You see how they look at me? They’re stuck on that person I used to be. They can’t see that old life as just a moment in time that I’ve moved on from. It was a horrible life.”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, Genevieve

“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. (p.236)”
― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.”
― Dorothy Allison, Trash

“I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.”
― Dorothy Allison, Trash

“Ash swirls in the air and the landscape is gray rubble that falls away into the sea. They kept saying global warming wan't going to be the end of us, that it was just threats from the fanatics, that we didn't have to make changes. But every year there were more earthquakes and flood and hurricanes and fires- every element expressing its imbalance. Every year the temperatures soared and the ice melted and no one did anything. My pink house - no longer mine - stands on the edge of nowhere like a rose in a Salvador Dali surrealist desert landscape . . .”
― Francesca Lia Block, Love in the Time of Global Warming

“Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.”
― A.A. Milne

“how to (un)cage a girl

longer hair bigger breasts smoother skin
flatter stomach whiter teeth smaller nose
if you worry enough you won't have time
or energy to see
what really is

what could i have learned
if i didn't live here in this cell?
where could i have flown?
how would i have grown?
if i forgave this shell?

oh, my body
let me cradle you like my girl's
her long limbs spilling over
or folding up like silk
her gold-tinged curls
ringleting my fingers
her eyes the blue of sorrow
and hyacinth

oh, my body
when you are at peace
rocked here to sleep
as if by a mother
as if by a lover
who sees your flushed skin
the grace that you're in
the gleam of your hair
the green of your stare
then this soul can fly off
to understand pyramids and time
history
electricity
technology
symbology
that all of us are one
that all of us are love”
― Francesca Lia Block, How to (Un)cage a Girl

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.”
― Dorothy Allison

“People worry so much. Just enjoy your body. That you can love. And you're alive.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Ecstasia

“what would it be like if i thought i was pretty
what would it be like if i carried that knowledge around
like i do the knowledge that i am a writer
pretty like peonies pretty like satin pretty like the child i was
would i speak to you differently
would i be healthier less stressed
less worried
would i buy more shoes or fewer
would i be more or less afraid
of death would i find something else
to hate about myself
would i get this jealous
when your eyes aren't touching me
in this city of movie star beauties
would i be able to write such raw and seductive words
would you have fallen in love with me sooner
would i have frightened you away
before you had the chance?”
― Francesca Lia Block, How to (Un)cage a Girl

“The happier you are, the less you need.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Ecstasia

“No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.”
― Maya Angelou

“We try on different dresses, different selves, but our souls are always the same - ongoing, full of light.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Psyche in a Dress

“In order to have bliss you have to be able to accept all the parts of the other, all the wildness and the darkness. You have to be able to hold on.”
― Francesca Lia Block, The Elementals

“Love is the worst earthquake there is. Can crush you to the thickness of your bones. Love can be like cancer sometimes. Terminal. It can make you vomit. It can make you want to cut it out. It can take you over against your will.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Quakeland