Karyn Ann > Karyn Ann's Quotes

“Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“So many things become beautiful when you really look.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“It's never too late to try a new approach to learning anything, and just because one has no expectation doesn't mean one has no hope.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts

“(T)here were always vacancies in the construct of life: blank spaces occupied by the unseen guest, the absent friend.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts

“Sometimes it's like that. You know something good is coming, and even though it's not even close yet, still, just knowing it's coming is enough to make you snort and nicker. Sort of." -Jack”
― Gary D. Schmidt, Orbiting Jupiter

“The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

“You know how teachers are. If they get you to take out a book they love too, they're yours for life.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, Orbiting Jupiter

“The gifts of God are rarely what we expect.”
― Charlie Lovett, The Lost Book of the Grail

“You'll get over it...' It's the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to greive over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I've thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn't finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you're not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Do the dead find peace beyond the rattle of the world? What peace is there for us whose best love cannot return them even for a day? I raise my head to the door and think I will see you in the frame. I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word was yours.

The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“Making the decision to have a child—it’s wondrous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
― Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village

“I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.”
― Linda Pastan

“Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did - that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that - a parent's heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.”
― Debra Ginsberg

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Power

“One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.”
― Donald Hall

“She wasn't about to 'come on'. Men tried to make you believe in your own crazy. If you are hysterical they don't have to see you as an equal, look you in the eye like a person they have to respect. It suited them to make you think that all the shit they pulled, all the lies they told, were in your head. The only crazy part was that most women did believe their men or chose to pretend. Most kept on believing right up to the point the men walked out the door or killed them. (178)”
― Stephanie Powell Watts, No One Is Coming to Save Us

“The pain of the loss, the true loss of youth, the change of life, THE CHANGE, the terrible sure feeling of being shunted out of the everyday progress of living, the move from a player on the stage to a member of the audience—until finally, the fear that crept and inched into your mind, then your soul, that your life had amounted to too little. Like some version of that joke, life was terrible and in such small portions. And finally, the realization that you hadn’t performed enough or well enough and now everyone you loved would suffer. Why hadn’t anyone said something? Of course older women had said in their way. By way of warning and encouragement, they had told Sylvia not to get old. “Don’t get old!” they’d said. Like anyone ever in the history of time had had any intention of that.”
― Stephanie Powell Watts, No One Is Coming to Save Us

“I’m not sure I’d like to be burned. I think I might like to be fed to zoo animals. It would be both environmentally friendly and a lovely treat for the larger carnivores. Could you request that?”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“You’ve made me shiny, Laura,” I said. I tried to stop it, but a little tear ran down the side of my nose. I wiped it away with the back of my hand before it could dampen the ends of my new hair. “Thank you for making me shiny.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“In the end, what matters is this: I survived.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“You can't have too much dog in a book.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“How quickly someone else's life can enter through the cracks we don't know are there until this foreign thing is inside of us. We are more porous than we know.”
― Emily Ruskovich, Idaho

“Kindness that is nothing special is the rarest and most honest.”
― Emily Ruskovich, Idaho

“sibling laughter–he can hear it– not the laughter of school friends or neighbors or cousins. Something secret in that laughter, private, edged with meanness and devotion”
― Emily Ruskovich, Idaho