Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

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#1

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

tags: acceptance, hope, life, love

2664 likes

#2

“Listen earnestly to anything [your children] want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.”
― Catherine M. Wallace

105 likes

#3

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme….

There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.

The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.

When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

tags: listening, love, poignant

405 likes

#4

“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

tags: empathy, listening, shame, speaking

651 likes

#5

“Defensiveness is usually someone silently screaming that they need you to value and respect them in disguise. When you look for deeper meanings behind someone’s pain you can then begin to heal not only yourself, but others.”
― Shannon Alder

242 likes

#6

“Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.”
― Shannon L. Alder

tags: anger, communication, compassion, competition, cruelty, fake, fake-christians, family-members, games, hatred, hurting-people, jealousy, listening, mental-disorders, no-communication, no-talking, passive-agressive-behavior, pity, reaching-out, sisters, talking, understanding

228 likes

#7

“my mother
is pure radiance.

she is the sun
i can touch
and kiss

and hold
without
getting burnt.”
― Sanober Khan

tags: deep-love, family, family-love, mother, mothers-day, mothers-love, sun, sunshine, warm, warmth

242 likes

#8

“Many of us dream of a better, safer, more caring world, without recognizing that it all begins with creating and maintaining a deeper love in our own home. The seeds of world peace should be planted in our own backyard.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

tags: better-world, caring-world, charity-begins-at-home, compassionate-world, family-love, heal-the-world, home-life, loving-home, safe-at-home, safer-world

4 likes

#9

“Like a song written on a piece of paper in the air, you may not see its notes, but as it glides, you can see its tune dance, from a love light so fair.

~Song of Susan”
― Benjamin Aubrey Myers

tags: angelic-wind, family-love, jesse-edward

1 likes

#10

“A Grandmother thinks of her grandchildren day and night, even when they are not with her.She will always love them more than anyone would understand.”
― Karen Gibbs, A Gallery of Scrapbook Creations

tags: family-life, family-love, grandchildren, grandma, grandparents, inspirational, life-experience

15 likes

#11

“It was a love story about a father and a son. The rest was window dressing. As a love story between a parent and a child, it was universal. Didn't matter that I was gay, that he was deaf, that we didn't fit in, that we were each outcasts in our own way”
― Nick Wilgus, Shaking the Sugar Tree

tags: family-love

5 likes

#12

“The bond of love and the bond of peace keep us together in harmony.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

tags: christian-life, family, family-love, love, motivational, peace, people, spirituality

1 likes

#13

“Long sleeps the summer in the seed.

Verse CIV”
― Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam

tags: hibernation, hidden-potential, potential, rebirth, rejuvenation, resurrection

6 likes

#14

“I am filled time and again
with a heart-aching wonder
when I think

of the fire
and frost of memories

of the everlastingness
of love

the solace
of family
and the power
of prayer.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

tags: everlasting, family, feelings, fire, frost, heart, heart-ache, life-quotes, love, memories, nostalgia, poetry, poetry-quotes, poets, powerful, prayer, solace, wonder

29 likes

#15

“A relationship is likely to last way longer, if each partner convinces or has convinced themselves that they do not deserve their partner, even if that is not true.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: adage, adages, africa, african, aphorism, aphorisms, arrogance, arrogant, axiom, axioms, boyfriend, boyfriends, convince, convinced, convincing, date, dating, deep, deserve, deserving, dictum, dictums, epigram, epigrams, funny, girlfriend, girlfriends, gnome, gnomes, humble, humbled, humility, humor, humorous, humour, husband, husbands, insightful, made-me-think, make-you-think, maxim, maxims, partner, partners, persuade, persuaded, persuading, philosopher, profound, proverb, proverbs, provoke-thought, quotation, quotations, quote, quote-of-the-day, quotes, relationship, satire, satirical, saying, sayings, south-africa, south-african, thought-provoking, thoughtful, true, wife, wives

67 likes

#16

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

tags: body, disability

12 likes

#17

“I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy

tags: disability, education, literature

35 likes

#18

“It got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn't do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

tags: chronic-illness

18 likes

#19

“You stop noticing pain, is the thing.
You notice it when it’s really bad, or when it’s different, but… on the rare occasion someone asks me what it’s like to live with RA, I don’t ever know what to say. They ask me if its painful, and I say yes because I know intellectually it must be, because the idea of doing some of the things that other people do without thinking fills me with dread and panic, but I always think about it mechanically. I can’t do x. I don’t want to do y. I don’t continue the thought into I can’t do that because it would hurt. I don’t want to do that because then I would be in pain.
You can’t live like that. There’s only so much you can carry quietly by yourself, so you turn an illness into a list of rules instead of a list of symptoms, and you take pills that don’t help, and you do stretches, and you think instead of feeling. You think.”
― Hannah Moskowitz, Sick Kids in Love

tags: chronic-illness

14 likes

#20

“Mark Vink is a not a typical ME/CFS patient. He is severely ill. It takes him twelve hours to recover from a walk from his bed to the bathroom. While he’s not typical he may not be that uncommon, though. Some estimates suggest that about 25% of ME/CFS patients are home bound or bedridden. Few ever make it into research studies.”
― Cort Johnson

tags: bedridden, chronic-fatigue-syndrome, chronic-illness, housebound, me-cfs-quotes, myalgic-encephalomyelitis, severe-me

1 likes

#21

“Sophia’s case sheds light on CFS because there were changes in her dorsal ganglia – the gatekeepers to sensation in the brain – and we know that fatigue depends on sensory perception.”
― Abhijit Chaudhuri

tags: basal-ganglia, chronic-fatigue-syndrome, chronic-illness, me-cfs, myalgic-encephalomyelitis

1 likes

#22

“It is like walking down a street and every so often someone beats the shit out of you. You mostly heal, but some injuries just don’t, and then you go out and walk some more, and someone comes by and beats the shit out of you again.”
― Jade Sharma, Problems

tags: chronic-illness, chronic-pain, illness, pain

18 likes

#23

“You, dear sister, may be the last bastion of sanity in a culture gone mad. In a world so toxic it cannot function, so numb it cannot even cry out for help, so disconnected it cannot heal. Except through the cells of our bodies.
Our sisters are dying right now to tell you,
Enough suffering, it is time to heal.”
― Lucy H. Pearce, Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing

tags: chronic-illness, healing, health

2 likes

#24

“It’s the beating of my heart.
The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It’s the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I’d found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door.
Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there,
I was still the one locking the door every night.
Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home.
’cause I was never really well around the expectations of my personality
and I wanted to keep to myself.
and because I haven’t been very impressed lately.
By people,
or places.
Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

tags: alone, awake, berlin, candles, doors, expectations, found, home, impressed, lonely, lost, lost-love, love, moon, moonlight, night, people, personality, places, shadows, solitude, thoughts, travel, wall, wander, wandering, window

80 likes

#25

“You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you’re the house where people come and go as they please, because you’re simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn’t let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You’re still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn’t have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

tags: alone, apathetic, bed, books, bored, care, desert, doors, grief, house, leave, let-in, lonely, loss, numb, people, poems, poetry, recovery, they, tumblr-poetry, tumblr-writers, unimpressed, wind

68 likes

#26

“She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

tags: consciousness, doors, falling-asleep, sleep, sophie-dale-drinkwater, sparkling-darkness

59 likes

#27

“She scoured the Earth, wandering and ravenous, looking for doors. And she found them. She found them in abandoned churches and the salt-rimed walls of caves, in graveyards and behind fluttering curtains in foreign markets. She found so many her imagining of the world grew lacy and tattered with holes, like a mouse-chewed map.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

tags: discoveries, doors, reading

18 likes

#28

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

917 likes

#29

“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

tags: escape, inspirational, life, mind

179 likes

#30

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

170 likes

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