Gulmira Batyrkhan > Gulmira's Quotes

“Sometimes I get the feeling [my parents have] asked me to hold this big invisible secret for them, like a backpack full of rocks--all these things they don't want to know about themselves. I'm supposed to wear it as I hike up this trail toward my adulthood. They're already at the summit of Full Grown Mountain. They're waiting for me to get there and cheering me on, telling me I can do it, and sometimes scolding and asking why I'm not hiking any faster or why I'm not having more fun along the way. I know I'm not supposed to talk about this backpack full of their crazy, but sometimes I really wish we could all stop for a second. Maybe they could walk down the trail from the top and meet me. We could unzip that backpack, pull out all of those rocks, and leave the ones we no longer need by the side of the trail. It'd make the walk a lot easier. Maybe then my shoulders wouldn't get so tense when Dad lectures me about money or Mom starts a new diet she saw on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store.”
― Aaron Hartzler, What We Saw

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“if you want to enjoy the rewards of being loved, you also have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher's prophecy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've "had it" and "the last straw has broken the camel's back" and they're "pissed off and pooped out." Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“The emotions, traits, and behaviors we reject in our parents will likely live on in us. It’s our unconscious way of loving them, a way to bring them back into our lives.”
― Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

“A child who takes care of a parent often forges a lifelong pattern of overextension and creates a blueprint for habitually feeling overwhelmed.”
― Mark Wolynn, It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

“No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“You are who I love, you struggling to see

You struggling to love or find a question

You better than me

You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping

You noticing the butterflies

You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand

You studying stars, you are who I love”
― Aracelis Girmay, Mother Mother You Are Who I Love

“& this kindness returns me to myself. it reminds me of the kindness of other things i love”
― Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia

“It’s a sad reality for me in my late twenties. At the beginning of the decade, the people I was close to seemed like friends for life, people I could never imagine not seeing every day. But life happens, love happens, loss happens. Change and growth happen at different paces for different people and sometimes the paces just don’t line up. It’s devastating if I think too much about it so I usually don’t.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden