Mirie > Mirie's Quotes

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller

“The truly free man is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.”
― Jules Renard, The Journal of Jules Renard

“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.”
― Grace Paley

“La idea de que me iré de un mundo que está cada vez peor no me gusta, porque siempre pensé que era mi deber dejar el mundo mejor de lo que lo había encontrado. Si se tiene el hábito de ver cada día como una jornada completa, envejecer es interesante. Todos los días se conoce a una persona nueva, una puesta de sol nueva. Todos los días pasan cosas hermosas".”
― Grace Paley

“After all, hope is a form of planning.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]”
― Barbara Tuchman

“How beautiful to find a heart that loves you, without asking you for anything, but to be okay.”
― khalil gibran

“You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a covenant between equals. Al Sharpton always says, "We're all created equal, but we don't all end up equal.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“No daylight to separate us.

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Today I have grown taller from walking with the trees.”
― Karle Wilson Baker

“I love the friendly faces of old sorrows;
I have no secrets that they do not know.”
― Karle Wilson Baker, Blue Smoke: A Book Of Verses

“All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Es demasiado fácil pensar que sólo los monstruos son capaces de cometer actos monstruosos.”
― Boris Cyrulnik, Las almas heridas: Las huellas de la infancia, la necesidad del relato y los mecanismos de la memoria (PSICOLOGÍA / RESILIENCIA nº 100622)

“She felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.”
― William H. Gass, The Tunnel

“Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone—in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.”
― William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life