Thao Doan > Thao's Quotes

“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don't wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

“Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate and make sure you know exactly what it is you want. No one can hit their target with their eyes closed.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym

“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

“He's a wallflower. You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“My sister had taught me to look at the world that way, as a place that glitters, as a place where the calls of the crickets and the crows and the wind are everyday occurrences that also happen to be magic.”
― Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira

“Because you are alive, everything is possible.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ

“I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“In other words, let's face it: Life is basically unfair. But even in a situation that's unfair, I think it's possible to seek out a kind of fairness. Of course, that might take time and effort. And maybe it won't seem to be worth all that. It's up to each individual to decide whether or not it is.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Things are never as bad as they seem.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Summer, and he watches his children's heart break. Autumn again and Boo's children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“The only way to overcome sadness is to consume it. ”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”
― Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic