Helen Schultz > Helen's Quotes

“I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I said, I want to tell you something.
She said, you can tell me tomorrow.
I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary.
The books in my father's shed were sighing.
The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing.
I thought about waking her.
But it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you ... It's always necessary.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.”
― Tony Kushner, Perestroika

“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That's how people change.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”
― Tony Kushner, Perestroika

“You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.”
― Tony Kushner, Angels in America

“Women like us have to learn to give to those who appreciate it instead of to those who expect it.”
― Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles

“...one of those unfortunate women who did not find nice men interesting. She found undesirables desirable. She sought out unpleasant boyfriends, then complained about them as though the government had allocated them to her.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“Sometimes I'm afraid I'm happy, but because I expect it to be something else, I question the experience. So now, when in doubt," she shrugged with true bravado, "I'll assume I'm happy.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. ”
― Carrie Fisher

“One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.”
― Carrie Fisher

“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”
― Carrie Fisher

“There's no room for demons when you're self-possessed.”
― Carrie Fisher

“I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“I rarely cry. I save my feelings up inside me like I have something more specific in mind for them. I am waiting for the exact perfect situation and then BOOM! I'll explode in a light show of feeling and emotion - a pinata stuffed with tender nuances and pent-up passions”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“If you look at the person someone chooses to have a relationship with, you’ll see what they think of themselves.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“Life is a cruel, horrible joke and I am the punch line.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“Happy is one of the many things I'm likely to be over the course of a day and certainly over the course of a lifetime. But I think if you have the expectation that you're going to be happy throughout your life--more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time--well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“She wanted so to be tranquil, to be someone who took walks in the late-afternoon sun, listening to the birds and crickets and feeling the whole world breathe. Instead, she lived in her head like a madwoman locked in a tower, hearing the wind howling through her hair and waiting for someone to come and rescue her from feeling things so deeply that her bones burned.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

“I suspect that no matter what happens I will allow it to hurt me. Eat away at my insides, as it were—as it will be. As it always has been. Why am I so accessible? Why do I give myself to people who will always and should always remain strangers? I have always relied on the cruelty of strangers and I must stop it now.”
― Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

“It’s up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren’t going well. Nouwen calls that the “discipline of gratitude.” To me, it means not just being grateful for the good things, because that’s easy, but also to be grateful for the hard things too. To be grateful even for our flaws, because in the end, they make us stronger by giving us a chance to reach beyond our grasp.”
― Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit