Heather Clarke > Heather's Quotes

“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. (p.9)”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly's wings.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.
It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense
of direction.
It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.
It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.
It doesn’t matter.
The people who are meant for you are going to meet you
on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort
zone around the things that actually move you forward.
Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of
being understood, you’re going to be seen.
All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you
no longer are.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“A girl was like a kite; without her mother's strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“... home was not just a cabin in a deep woods that overlooked a placid cove. Home was a state of mind, the peace that came from being who you were and living an honest life.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.

Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. We don't get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“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

“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“What if resting, all by itself, is the real act of holiness? What if honoring the gift of
our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe? The natural world has never
needed us more than it needs us now, but we can’t be of much use to it if we remain in a perpetual state of exhaustion and despair.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Pull up a weed from the wet soil of the drenched garden and smell the rich life the earthworm has left behind. Just a whiff of it will flood you with a feeling of well-being. The microbes in freshly turned soil stimulate serotonin production, working on the human brain the same way antidepressants do.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all
there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred
and distrust taking over the news.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“…nobody in isolation becomes who they were designed to be.”
― Anne Lamott, Somehow: Thoughts on Love

“Life is such a mystery that you have to wonder if God drinks a little.”
― Anne Lamott, Somehow: Thoughts on Love

“in American history. Those who think this fact has no place in our schools would—intentionally or not—hasten a return to unquestioned white dominance. We should never forget that it took National Guard soldiers to get Black and white kids seated together in American schools, that abstract notions of a colorblind Constitution weren’t a shield against slavery’s horrors or the savagery of lynching, that Jim Crow was a legal regime codifying racial subordination, and that civil rights wrested from white supremacy’s stingy fingers could be snatched back.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“Progress, when it has come for Black Americans, has typically come with equal or greater benefits for white Americans.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“we are witnessed, even at the end of our lives. You are seen. You are heard. Your life matters. Your death will too.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End