Lauren Maxey > Lauren's Quotes

“When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
― Maya Angelou

“Cheaters are cowards that are tempted to chase the fantasy of what could be… instead of courageously addressing their own self-destructive behavior and cultivating what is.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“I have always found it odd that people who think passive aggressively ignoring a person is making a point to them. The only point it makes to anyone is your inability to articulate your point of view because deep down you know you can’t win. It’s better to assert yourself and tell the person you are moving on without them and why, rather than leave a lasting impression of cowardness on your part in a person’s mind by avoiding them.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Darkness... When everything that you know and love... is taken from you so harshly... all you can think about is anger, hatred, and even revenge... and no one can save you.”
― Orochimaru

“When your mind wants to bolt, but your heart hangs on, it is because you don’t know with absolute certainty what the truth is. When you waste so much time on something that you want to believe is true, you begin to overthink things. Eventually, something obvious becomes twisted into something absurd, which keeps us from believing a simpler answer. Over time, you believe your own lies and fantasies to shield yourself from hurt, when following what is logical would have been the quickest way to healing. It is through your own self-imposed delusions that you lose your perspective. The world then becomes different to you when in fact you are different. Why? Because your own ego gets in the way. Everyone wants to feel special. Everyone wants to have faith in others. Everyone wants to believe in fairytales, happy endings and have all bad interactions with others explained. It is easier to sit in denial with your delusions and pray God will intervene, not realizing he has. He gave you commonsense and intuition, but you didn’t like how it made you feel. This is what true mental illness really is: Following your gut instinct through hell because you want to prove you are right, either to yourself or others. You sacrifice choosing to do right, in order to avoid pain. However, you don't realize that you have been in pain for a really long time and believed this was how happiness felt.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“As she had been walking from the ward to that room, she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings to surface, feelings that had been repressed for years in her soul. She had actually FELT them, and they were no longer necessary, they could leave.”
― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

“Somewhere between love and hate lies confusion, misunderstanding and desperate hope.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Our souls yearn for connection with all souls. There are people we think we prefer and others we don’t, but half the time that’s a lie: We tell ourselves the fairy tale of our hatreds out of fear, but we revisit that tale as it suits us. Deep down, we’d love to love and be loved by all.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

“Revenge in the hands of your enemies is a loaded gun. You can beg them for mercy, wave the white flag of surrender, but the only true elixir for the vitriol they bestow is a measure of hatred dispensed of your own.”
― Addison Moore, Wicked

“I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.”
― Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice

“Love sometimes makes people ruthless in a way that not even hatred can.”
― Francesca Marciano, Casa Rossa

“Hatred is a form of faith, distilled by passion to remove all rationality.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., The Elysium Commission

“When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.”
― Graham Greene, Orient Express

“I'm not crying because of you; you're not worth it. I'm crying because my delusion of who you were was shattered by the truth of who you are.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“You didn't just cheat on me; you cheated on us. You didn't just break my heart; you broke our future.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“Sometimes problems don’t require a solution to solve them; instead they require maturity to outgrow them.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra - A Book For All And None