Vicki Narvaez > Vicki's Quotes

“These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. So let them go, let go of them. I tie no weights to my ankles.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present, and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“People have to forgive. We don't have to like them, we don't have to be friends with them, we don't have to send them hearts in text messages, but we have to forgive them, to overlook, to forget. Because if we don't we are tying rocks to our feet, too much for our wings to carry!”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway... let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Life has three rules: Paradox, Humor, and Change.

- Paradox: Life is a mystery; don't waste your time trying to figure it out.

- Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure

- Change: Know that nothing ever stays the same.”
― Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives

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

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Lucy: Do you think you have Pantophobia, Charlie Brown?
Charlie: I don't know, what is pantophobia?
Lucy: The fear of Everything.
Charlie: THAT'S IT!!!”
― Charles M. Schulz

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
― Albert Einstein

“What makes us leave what we love best?
What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself
When we need it most,
That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake
And holds us flush there
until we begin to love it
And have to begin again?
What is it within our own lives we decline to live
Whenever we find it,
making our days unendurable,
And nights almost visionless?
I still don't know yet, but I do it.”
― Charles Wright, Littlefoot: A Poem

“I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“All of them had a restlessness in common.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
― Carl Sagan

“Become totally empty
Quiet the restlessness of the mind
Only then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness”
― Laotzu

“New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.”
― Thomas Merton

“This accidental
meeting of possibilities
calls itself I.

I ask: what am I doing here?
And, at once, this I
becomes unreal.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“And when you were a silent word upon Life's quivering lips, I too was there, another silent word. Then life uttered us and we came down the years throbbing with memories of yesterday and with longing for tomorrow, for yesterday was death conquered and tomorrow was birth pursued.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“I came here to be for all and with all,
and what I do today in my solitude
will be echoed tomorrow by the multitude.

What I say now with one heart
will be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts...”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet and Other Writings