Sara > Sara's Quotes

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I take refuge in awareness; I take refuge in truth; I take refuge in love”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“What would it be like if I could accept life--accept this moment--exactly as it is?”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.”
― Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives.”
― Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

“LIFE’S work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Pocket Pema Chodron

“What causes misery is always trying to get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek happiness—this sense of ours that there could be lasting security and happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Pocket Pema Chodron

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Pocket Pema Chodron

“Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I might become if I'm not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz. The divorcee in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn't eat dairy but smokes menthols, who's always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergarteners and says things like, "Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I'll let you wear my mood ring...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.”
― Brene Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn't need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn't need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“You don't love a girl because of beauty. You love her because she sings a song only you can understand.”
― L.J. Smith, Secret Vampire

“I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
― Susan Sontag