Carole > Carole's Quotes

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Practice the pause. Pause before judging. Pause before assuming. Pause before accusing. Pause whenever you're about to react harshly and you'll avoid doing and saying things you'll later regret.”
― Lori Deschene

“When you come to the edge of all that you know, you must believe one of two things: either there will be ground to stand on, or you will be given wings to fly.”
― O.R. Melling, The Summer King

“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.”
― M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Pain has a flavor. The question is...what does it taste like to you?”
― Lisa Gardner

“She still loves the feel of a new book. While she appreciates the convenience of those thin, slick e-readers, they don't give her the three-dimensional sensory experience that comes with a real book.”
― Lisa Genova, Love Anthony

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“...the notion of the classroom as an intellectual community gets lost when conference rooms by the principal's office are turned into data rooms - rooms in which walls, floor to ceiling, are covered with test scores of every child in the school - and "Days Until the TEST" banners greet students and parents as they enter the school. That, at the very least, suggests the school is more interested in making sure students pass a test than in creating an intellectual community.”
― Kylene Beers & Robert E. Probst, Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading

“Living a life fully engaged and full of whimsy and the kind of things that love does is something most people plan to do, but along the way they just kind of forget. Their dreams become one of those "we'll go there next time" deferrals. The sad thing is, for many there is no "next time" because passing on the chance to cross over is an overall attitude toward life rather than a single decision.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she’d worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she’d set her down, Pearl would cry. There’d scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother’s leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there was something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia’s in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia’s arm pinned beneath Pearl’s head, or Pearl’s legs thrown across Mia’s belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.”
― Tracey Garvis Graves, The Girl He Used to Know

“Sometimes it's exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I've lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn't simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it's gone, nothing is whole again.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.

Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. We don't get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“We are so lucky to have our children, even for a little while, but we take them for granted. We make the stupid assumption that as long as we are here, they will be, too, though that’s never been part of the contract.”
― Jodi Picoult, Mad Honey

“I found it strange that no word exists for a parent who loses a child. If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.”
― Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers

“It’s . . . unbelievable. You never forget how it feels. Sometimes I think that children should be teenagers first, and become small afterwards, because it’s unbearable for parents to get used to the fact that they don’t jump anymore.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Answer Is No

“Life is beautiful and life is ugly and we have to learn
To live with both sides of the same coin
and see the light in the darkness.
The world is Beautiful ugly,
relationships are Beautiful ugly,
and life is Beautiful ugly.”
― Alice Feeney, Beautiful Ugly