Leen > Leen's Quotes

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
― Albert Einstein

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“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

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“A person's a person, no matter how small.”
― Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”
― Dr. Seuss

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Maggie held a pail of river water. She knew the well water would be too sweet. The river would have a bit of salt in it, and any healing comes first through hurt before it makes it to peace. That was a terrible thing, she knew. Yet there was nothing truer. She knew it was why so many people saw no point, didn’t have the resolve to make it through, and got stuck. A sucking mud. The sinking kind. There were a lot of people there. Knee-deep. Some submerged. Some clawing their way to solid ground. How few would make it.”
― Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

“Being sick is supposed to come along with grand realizations about What Really Matters, but I don't know. I think deep down, we're already aware of what's important and what's not. Which isn't to say that we always live our lives accordingly. We snap at our spouses and curse the traffic and miss the buds pushing up from the ground. But we know. We just forget to know sometimes.

Near-death forces us to remember. It pushes us into a state of aggressive gratitude that throws what's big and what's small into the sharpest relief. It's awfully hard to worry about the puddle of milk when you're just glad to be here to spill it.

Aggressive gratitude, though, is no way to live. It's too easy. We're meant to work at these things. To strive to know. Our task is to seek out what's essential, get distracted by the fluff, and still know, feel annoyed by annoyances, and find our way back. The so-called small stuff actually matters very much. It's what we push against on our way to figuring out how much we wish to think and be. We need that dialectic, and illness snatches it away. A stubbed toe, a too-long line at the post office, these things and the fluster they bring are signifiers of a healthy life, and I craved them.”
― Jessica Fechtor, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home

“It’s interesting-most people think about therapy as something that involves going in and undoing what’s happened. But whatever your past experiences created in your brain, the associations exist and you can’t just delete them. You can’t get rid of the past.
Therapy is more about building new associations, making new, healthier default pathways. It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore. Therapy is building a better alternative, a new default. And that takes repetition, and time, honestly, it works best if someone understands how the brain changes. This is why understanding how trauma impacts our health is essential for everyone.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“So often we use the word snapped when we don’t know where a burst of anger is coming from or why someone is having a violent reaction. Well, now we know: Something has happened in the moment that triggers one of the brain’s trauma memories. And because the lower, non-rational parts of the brain are its first responders, they immediately set off stress responses that then shut off the reasonable part of the brain. And so that “burst” of violence is actually the result of some highly organized processes in the brain. And in this case, the first thing the school is going to say is, What’s wrong with him?”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Our brain is organized to act and feel before we think. This is also how our brain develops—sequentially, from the bottom up. The developing infant acts and feels, and these actions and feelings help organize how they will begin to think.”
― Oprah Winfrey, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“When we meet someone, we form a first impression (“He seems like a really nice guy”), frequently with no apparent information on which to base it. This is because attributes of the person evoke in us something we’ve previously categorized as familiar and positive. The opposite can happen (“This guy is a complete jerk”) if some attribute taps into a previous negative experience. Our brain catalogs vast amounts of input from our family, community, and culture, along with what is presented to us in the media. As it makes sense of what it’s stored, it begins to form a worldview. If we later meet someone with characteristics unlike what we’ve cataloged, our default response is to be wary, defensive. In turn, if our brains are filled with associations based upon media-driven biases about ideal body type, or racial or cultural stereotypes, for example, we will exhibit implicit biases (and maybe overt bias).”
― Oprah Winfrey, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Because we all love imperfectly.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

“Faith is to believe what we do not see; and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe. - Saint Augustine”
― Dr Bradley Nelson, The Emotion Code: How to Release Your Trapped Emotions for Abundant Health, Love and Happiness

“Thoughts are Powerful Your thoughts are immensely powerful. Whenever you say what you’re thinking or write something down, you’re using the energy of your thoughts to affect the world around you. It is through thought, belief and intention that all things happen.”
― Bradley Nelson, The Emotion Code: How to Release Your Trapped Emotions for Abundant Health, Love and Happiness

“Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken - you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you are fixing.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible

“How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the same chorus, with the inability to forgive ourselves. How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have doneor said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to – worship – the choice we think we could or should have made.”
― Edith Eva Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible

“The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice

“the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice

“When we abdicate taking responsibility for ourselves, we are giving up our ability to create and discover meaning. In other words, we give up on life.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible

“We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light.”
― Edith Eger, The Choice

“Being uncomfortable is good, beta. It’s in discomfort that growth happens.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“On the other hand, wasn't that the very definitely of life? Constant adaptations brought about by a series of never-ending mistakes?”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry