Emily > Emily's Quotes

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
― Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. ”
― Frederick Buechner

“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one. ”
― Martin Heidegger

“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”
― Josephine Hart, Damage

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.”
― E.B. White

“Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place whey are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

“It's so transparent, how willing we are to dismiss the intelligence of someone who rejects us, as though that renders them incapable of sound judgment.”
― Mary-Louise Parker, Dear Mr. You

“Most everything you said in the rehearsal room as a director was applicable to life. You said, 'Let go of what happened last time,' and 'Start with what you know' and 'Don't expect a response.”
― Mary-Louise Parker, Dear Mr. You

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
― Joe Klaas, The Twelve Steps to Happiness: A Practical Handbook for Understanding and Working the Twelve Step Programs for Alcoholism, Codependency, Eating Disorders, and Other Addictions

“I believe that man’s noblest endowment is his capacity to change. Armed with reason, he can see two sides and choose: He can be divinely wrong. I believe in man’s right to be wrong. Out of this right he has built, laboriously and lovingly, something we reverently call democracy. He has done it the hard way and continues to do it the hard way — by reason, by choosing, by error and rectification, by the difficult, slow method in which the dignity of A is acknowledged by B, without impairing the dignity of C. Man cannot have dignity without loving the dignity of his fellow.”
― Leonard Bernstein, This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women

“The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales... literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“Henry wonders, as they wait in the queue, if some people have natural style, or if they simply have the discipline to curate themselves every day.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities...In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living...never underestimate the big importance of small things.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“...I reread the work of my friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who'd died a few months earlier. She'd once written, 'For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That's pretty much all the info u need.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.”
― Anne Lamott

“The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn’t really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.”
― Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.”
― Anne Lamott

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I'm just saying that a character can be as real as a person. Or teach you as much anyway.”
― Erica Bauermeister, No Two Persons

“That was the beauty of books wasn't it? They took you places you didn't know you needed to go.”
― Erica Bauermeister, No Two Persons

“She'd be okay, he told himself, and he needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere so completely else that the grief wouldn't find him. Ignoring the fact that grief is not a stalker but a stowaway, always there and up for any journey.”
― Erica Bauermeister, No Two Persons

“Many of my thoughts will be only half-baked. Their batter may not be even quite mixed. Finish baking them your own way—or cook up something else.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life