Hannah Young > Hannah's Quotes

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  • #1
    Mary Oliver
    “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

  • #3
    Oscar Wilde
    “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

  • #4
    Alan Lightman
    “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

  • #9
    Beverly Donofrio
    “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

  • #11
    John Fowles
    “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

  • #15
    A.W. Tozer
    “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

  • #21
    “The search for Jesus is about reconciling loss and tragedy to God and us.”
    W. Scott Lineberry

  • #34
    Terri Garey
    “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
    Terri Garey

  • #38
    Albert Schweitzer
    “The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him while he lives.”
    Albert Schweitzer

  • #39
    Roland Merullo
    “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

  • #40
    Francesca Lia Block
    “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

  • #41
    “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

  • #42
    Richelle E. Goodrich
    “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

  • #44
    Dorothy Allison
    “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

  • #44
    Eric Jerome Dickey
    “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

  • #45
    Dorothy Allison
    “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
    Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

  • #46
    C.G. Jung
    “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

  • #49
    Dorothy Allison
    “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

  • #49
    Dorothy Allison
    “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

  • #50
    Francesca Lia Block
    “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

  • #50
    A.A. Milne
    “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

  • #51
    Francesca Lia Block
    “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

  • #52
    Dorothy Allison
    “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

  • #53
    Francesca Lia Block
    “People worry so much. Just enjoy your body. That you can love. And you're alive.”
    Francesca Lia Block, Ecstasia
    tags: body, love

  • #54
    Francesca Lia Block
    “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
    tags: pretty

  • #55
    Francesca Lia Block
    “The happier you are, the less you need.”
    Francesca Lia Block, Ecstasia

  • #56
    Maya Angelou
    “No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.”
    Maya Angelou

  • #57
    Francesca Lia Block
    “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

  • #58
    Francesca Lia Block
    “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
    tags: love

  • #59
    Francesca Lia Block
    “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
    tags: love



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