Julia Riggieri > Julia's Quotes

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
― John Steinbeck

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.”
― Tennesse Williams, Camino Real

“Till this moment I never knew myself.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.”
― James Baldwin

“Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion.”
― Keith Haring, Keith Haring Journals

“If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“ANY REAL CHANGE IMPLIES THE breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free—he has set himself free—for higher dreams, for greater privileges. All men have gone through this, go through it, each according to his degree, throughout their lives. It is one of the irreducible facts of life. And remembering this, especially since I am a Negro, affords me almost my only means of understanding what is happening in the minds and hearts of white Southerners today.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.”
― James Baldwin

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”
― James Baldwin

“I shall overcome everything, all the suffering, just in order to be able to say to myself: I am! Be it death by a thousand cuts—I am! Be it torture beyond endurance—I am! I may sit in a dungeon, but I exist; I see the sun, but if I didn’t see the sun, I’d still know it was there. And to know that the sun’s there, that’s the very stuff of life.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”
― James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin (Literary Conversations Series)

“Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s, I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. ”
― James Baldwin

“More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.”
― Cicero

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Isolation is not safety, it is death. If no one knows you're alive, you aren't.”
― Neil Hilborn

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“I kneel into a dream where I am good & loved. I am good. I am loved. My hands have made some good mistakes. They can always make better ones.”
― Natalie Wee, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.”
― Richard Rohr

“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,' said she afterwards to herself.  'There is nothing to be compared to it.  Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction: I am sure it will.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson