Emily Ferbey > Emily's Quotes

“If you want to get out of hell, you have to get through the fire to the other side. It’s like you are in a house, and it’s on fire. There are flames all around, especially at the front of the house, surrounding the door that is the only way out. Your impulse is to retreat into the house, try to find someplace safe. But, of course, you will just die there. You’ve got to find the courage to go through the flames at the front of the house, the flames around the door. Then you can get to the other side. You have to go through your anger, open up to your therapist, keep going through the pain. It isn’t overnight that you are going to feel better. But you will.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“It is hard to be happy without a life worth living. This is a fundamental tenet of DBT. Of course, all lives are worth living in reality. No life is not worth living. But what is important is that you experience your life as worth living—one that is satisfying, and one that brings happiness.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training: Manual

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Things do not change; we change.”
― henry david thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods