Laura > Laura's Quotes

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.”
― June Jordan

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― audre lorde

“It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithlessand therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer

“Confidence is not 'they will like me'. Confidence instead is 'I'll be fine if they don't'.”
― Christina Grimmie

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, Tome II

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.”
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“[I want to be remembered as] someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. ‘Cause I’ve gotten much more satisfaction for the things that I’ve done for which I was not paid.”
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy: Mastering Oral Argument

“Everyday you gotta wake up & be yourself, even if you suck, especially if you suck, because no one else sucks like you suck - Patrick Stump”
― Patrick Stump

“Don't let your learning lead to knowledge. Let your learning lead to action.”
― Jim Rohn

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.”
― Walt Disney

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
― Ram Dass

“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
― Ram Dass

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle would be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn't find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
― Ryunosuke Satoro