Brandi Bates > Brandi's Quotes

“Successful people replace the words “wish”, “should” and “try” with “I will”.”
― Brandi L. Bates

“I marveled over the cosmic metaphors in my life. Found that all I needed to see and all I needed to know; all I needed to understand could be found in a constellation shaped like the Big Dipper.”
― Brandi Bates

“All I could feel was love leaking in my soul and my heart seeping bits of heaven.”
― Brandi L. Bates, Amid the Cacophony of Cries

“Magic waited for me in the morning dew of this brand new day. And silence sang, so soft and low. It touched my sun dappled skin and kissed my parted lips.”
― Brandi Bates

“With you in my hand I can travel across the universe in one verse and skip moons to the tunes of Miles or Coltrane.”
― Brandi Bates

“So I watch my sadness, gleaming in all of its soft pastel glory. And I listen to the arguments against my sanity. ”
― Brandi Bates

“When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.”
― Brandi Bates

“When I'm drunk with feeling and nature is drinking from my lips and we reflect each other in our atmospheres, then my words come effortlessly and my fingers go into labor...day or night. ”
― Brandi Bates

“Lick my finger so I can scan your table of contents- fuck the index- I yearn to ride your story line.”
― Brandi Bates

“That night I wasn't reading your palm...I was monogramming my fingerprints on the sidewalks of your lifeline.”
― Brandi Bates

“The sky is a tight gray sheet of Baroque prose pulled snug”
― Brandi L. Bates

“All things grow, flourish, die, and re-grow. Life and death are continuous and fluid. Like the Sun and the Moon which die and are reborn, so do the seasons and all living things. ”
― Brandi L. Bates, Amid the Cacophony of Cries

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.”
― Marcus Garvey

“You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible.”
― Deepak Chopra

“You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could've, would've happened... or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on.”
― Tupac Shakur

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.”
― Audre Lorde

“Revolution is not a one time event.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll---then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Waiting is erotic”
― irene nemirovsky, Suite Française

“I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“You may control a mad elephant;
You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger;
Ride the lion and play with the cobra;
By alchemy you may learn your livelihood;
You may wander through the universe incognito;
Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful;
You may walk in water and live in fire;
But control of the mind is better and more difficult.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi