Susan > Susan's Quotes

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Some people see things that are and ask, Why?
Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?
Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that.”
― George Carlin

“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“To belittle, you have to be little.”
― Kahill Gibran, The Prophet

“Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.”
― Khalil Gibran, Kahlil Gibran, The Collected Works

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“J. M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan, said, “We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“But that’s the thing about adventures—you’re invited to take a chance without knowing the outcome, and all that matters is that you say yes.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“I was not a religious man, but if I were, the woods would be my church, the mountaintops my altar.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. . . . We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“As always, I was inspired by the gumption and spirit of Atticus. He doesn't harbor my fears or concerns. Life is simpler for him. He just goes out and does things he knows he can do.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“The first time I put the suit on him, we were in the store, and immediately he looked like he’d been to a taxidermist. He stood stiff as a freshly stuffed dog. He wouldn’t move his head. He wouldn’t even move his eyes. And he stood like this for a couple of minutes in the middle of the store. Nothing I could do would get him to budge. I knelt next to him and gave him the tiniest of nudges, hoping this would throw off his balance and cause him to move a leg for support. Nothing. I did it again. Nothing. I did it again, a little firmer. Still nothing. I did it a little firmer yet, and this time, instead of moving his legs to keep his balance, he toppled over onto his side—a dead, stuffed dog with stiff legs. The cause of death was humiliation; rigor mortis was immediate.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“Perhaps love is the process of my gently leading you back to yourself.” For that’s what that little dog did. He led, I followed, and in the end I became the man I dreamed of being when I was a little boy. So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing. —A. A. MILNE, THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass. I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.”
― Tom Ryan, Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship

“The basic process of climbing a mountain was therapeutic, almost cathartic. There was the simple act of walking into the woods and away from the world. Then there was the climb itself, where the body worked: muscles flexed and released, lungs rose and fell, the heart beat. It was as if the complications in my life were breaking down and the only thing I cared about was the next place I'd put my foot or finding something to hold to pull myself up. After all that work to get to the summit came that views from the top. The failed Catholic in me saw it as a spiritual journey, much like the ones any holy man had made in leaving behind society. Christ, Buddha, Muhammad - they all did it, and they came back with clarity. For me the climb was my confession, working out the troubles of my past. Sitting on top was communion. On each hike I allowed myself to be pulled apart and then put back together again.”
― Tom Ryan

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
― Rachel Carson

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.”
― Rachel Carson

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“Jewish food is a matter of text expressed on the table.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“So much was lost—names, faces, ages, ethnic identities—that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together,”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South—A James Beard Award Winner

“If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.”
― Anzia Yezierska

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin