Lenny Husen > Lenny's Quotes

“As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”
― Bill Bryson

“Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins

“When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.”
― Tom Robbins

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out-- when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Titles are public. They are for others to notice. I expect others to address me according to my titles, but I do not address myself with them-- unless, of course, I address myself as an other.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Only that which can change can continue.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Of course, immortality of the soul-- the bare soul, cleansed of any personality traces-- is rarely what is desired in the yearning for immortality... More often what one intends to preserve is a public personage, a permanently veiled selfhood.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“And Margot should have made a rule about no cell phones. What was it about life now? The people who weren't present always seemed to be more important than the people who were.”
― Elin Hilderbrand, Beautiful Day

“She waved good-bye and hurried down the street towards her family's house, thinking again that some nights had good karma and some nights were cursed, and for a few moments, tonight had seemed like the former, but it had ended up the latter.”
― Elin Hilderbrand, Beautiful Day

“Stuart and Jenna exchanged rings-platinum band for Stuart, and platinum with diamonds for Jenna, but they could have been aluminum or plastic. Expensive rings did not guarantee a happy life together.”
― Elin Hilderbrand, Beautiful Day

“She [Tate] wanted to swim but hadn't brought her suit. She considered jumping in her shorts and T-shirt – but she was determined, from this point forward, to act like a grown woman. Not a woman like Anita Fullin or like Chess or like her mother or like Aunt India – but like the woman that was inside herself.

Then she thought, the grown woman inside me is hot and sticky. And she jumped in.”
― Elin Hilderbrand, The Island

“From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.”
― Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits

“You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way".”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect. -And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“He spoke of very simple things- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.

"Set aside," came a voice from the multitude, "even if it be the Law of the Flock?"

"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonathan said. "There is no other.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull