Thuy Vu > Thuy's Quotes

“Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”
― Banana Yoshimoto

“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Any major illness transforms a patient’s—really, an entire family’s—life.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced
life.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything

“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

“The Bhagavad Gita--that ancient Indian Yogic text--says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I think I deserve something beautiful.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I want to be like the air. The good-hearted person whose kindness overflows and people realize how important she was to them, once she is gone. I want to be that kind of person.”
― Aya Kito, 1 Litre of Tears

“I felt someone behind me. I stopped and looked back... There was Mom, crawling behind me, without saying anything... Her tears falling to the floor... All my suppressed emotions suddenly burst out and I started crying.”
― Aya Kito, 1 Litre of Tears

“Want to know how to make yourself instantly unhappy? Compare yourself with someone else.”
― Fumio Sasaki, Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

“Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. —”
― Fumio Sasaki, Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos