Allison > Allison's Quotes

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

“True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will. The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or supplied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Ask yourself whether you are happy', observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.' At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won't occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it. All to often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“how normal it has become to feel as though you absolutely must do more than you can do.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“So if a certain activity really matters to you – a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause – the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

“I WON’T get upset!” Cliff shouted. “I want! to SEE! MOMMY KILL GRANDMA!”
― Tui T. Sutherland, Escaping Peril