Rumana Nawrin > Rumana's Quotes

“The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

“i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“You are my everlasting home. Don't you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“I felt like I'd unzipped my skin and momentarily stepped out of it, leaving a crazy person in charge”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“I felt someone should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one & say, we are sorry, but something strong & lasting had to do this for May, & you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Language disguises thought.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
― Joan Didion

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“To be distracted against one’s will is the surest sign that one is not in control.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Activity and reflection should ideally complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool...”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“...I hid myself between two leaves of sorrel, and there discharged the necessities of nature.”
― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“How often do I lull my seething blood to rest, for you have never seen anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as this heart.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“I live in a city sorrow built
It's in my honey, it's in my milk.”
― Matt Berninger

“In preparing for battle, I have found that planning is essential, but plans are useless. - Dwight D. Eisenhower”
― Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

“Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters