Sharon Dolin > Sharon's Quotes

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
― Doris Lessing

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”
― Mark Twain

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
― Louis Pasteur

“For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.”
― John Cheever

“A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. ”
― Coco Chanel

“For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
― Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed

“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
― Erin Bow

“Joy is the best makeup.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Gustav Flaubert

“Always lines, never forms! But where do they find these lines in Nature? For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.”
― Francisco Goya

“You become what you think about all day long.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.”
― Claude Monet

“Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”
― Mary Quant

“One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,
'the way one commits a crime.”
― Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III

“You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life.”
― Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves

“the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

from “The Testing Tree”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree: Poems

“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.”
― Ovid, Heroides

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
― Franz Kafka

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
― Adrienne Rich