Suzanne Severns > Suzanne's Quotes

“As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”.

As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody if I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this person was me. Today I call it “RESPECT”.

As I began to love myself I stopped craving for a different life, and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today I call it “MATURITY”.

As I began to love myself I understood that at any circumstance, I am in the right place at the right time, and everything happens at the exactly right moment. So I could be calm. Today I call it “SELF-CONFIDENCE”.

As I began to love myself I quit stealing my own time, and I stopped designing huge projects for the future. Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in my own rhythm. Today I call it “SIMPLICITY”.

As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health – food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it is “LOVE OF ONESELF”.

As I began to love myself I quit trying to always be right, and ever since I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is “MODESTY”.

As I began to love myself I refused to go on living in the past and worrying about the future. Now, I only live for the moment, where everything is happening. Today I live each day, day by day, and I call it “FULFILLMENT”.

As I began to love myself I recognized that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick. But as I connected it to my heart, my mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this connection “WISDOM OF THE HEART”.

We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations or any kind of problems with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of their crashing new worlds are born. Today I know “THAT IS LIFE”!”
― Charlie Chaplin

“You can't make anything if you're lost to yourself. You'll want to again, it's who you are. Wren, grieving is hard. Complex. Takes its own time.”
― Amy McNamara, Lovely, Dark and Deep

“The thing about grief is that you have to let yourself feel it. Even the worst parts. Especially the worst parts. Pass through it. Let it pass through you.
It´s your strenght-your humanity-your openness to your feelings. Even when you think you might not come through.”
― Amy McNamara, Lovely, Dark and Deep

“People are always quick to call evil what they do not know. The unknown sprouts fear. It spreads like an infection, burrowing into every facet of their lives. They need a scapegoat, someone to blame. Fingers are pointed, accusations are made, and a target lands on somebody’s back. They grow angry. They turn violent.
To history, human nature must be a stubborn and tiring student. No matter how many times history tries to show it the error of its ways, it never learns from its mistakes.”
― Kelseyleigh Reber, If I Resist

“A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points of
its own history, is like a person with Alzheimer's. And that can be a
social disease of a most destructive nature.”
― S.M. Sigerson, The Assassination of Michael Collins: What Happened At Béal na mBláth?

“That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.”
― C. S. Lewis

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
― Proust-M

“The brambles and the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets. Farther along and stronger, bonged the gongs of a throng of frogs, green and vivid on their lily pads. From the sky came the crying of flies, and the pilgrims leaped over a bleating sheep creeping knee-deep in a sleepy stream, in which swift and slippery snakes slid and slithered silkily, whispering sinful secrets.”
― James Thurber, The 13 Clocks

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes.”
― Charles R. Swindoll

“Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door.
* * *
They opened the door and stepped in.
They stopped.
The library deeps lay waiting for them.
Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“By relegating the things we fear and don't understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“She had still been learning how to live with the hard truth that the most interesting parts of her thoughts usually got left behind when she tried to put them into words.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don't always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Fear and rage are not very different when you think about it, two hungry animals that often hunt the same prey—emotion—and hide from the same predator—logic.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Thoughts are only thoughts.They are not you, you belong to yourself even when your thoughts don't.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“You can’t control it, that’s the thing,” I said. “Life is not something you wield, you know?”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter everyday. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“King Karma; I know that karma is a force in this universe, and that people will receive karmic justice for their actions. I know that this justice will come when the universe deems it appropriate and it may not be in this lifetime or the next, or the one after that.... but it will come.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“We are all afforded our physical existence so we can learn about ourselves.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“These are things that only dogs and women understand because we tap into the pain directly, we connect to pain directly from its source, and so it is at once brilliant and brutal and clear, like white-hot metal spraying out of a fire hose, we can appreciate the aesthetic while taking the worst of it straight in the face. Men, on the other hand, are all filters and deflectors and timed release.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles--preferably of his own making--in order to triumph. A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which, after all, is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“It makes one realize that the physicality if our world is a boundary to us only if our will is weak; a true champion can accomplish things that a normal person would think impossible.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain