VEILAH > VEILAH's Quotes

“She didn't know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you're far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know...do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, Secret Garden

“Acceptance

There are things I miss
that I shouldn't,
and those I don't
that I should.

Sometimes we want
what we couldn't—
sometimes we love
who we could.”
― Lang Leav, Lullabies (Volume 2)

“O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.”
― Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“I am completely half afraid to think.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“Tuesday, 5 July 2005 Trying to work out a seventy-year-old lady’s alcohol consumption to record in the notes. I’ve established that wine is her poison. Me: ‘And how much wine do you drink per day, would you say?’ Patient: ‘About three bottles on a good day.’ Me: ‘OK . . . And on a bad day?’ Patient: ‘On a bad day I only manage one.”
― Adam Kay, This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

“We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don't do them and see what happens.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.”
― Charlie Kaufman

“Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, “the more masters will he have to serve.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Sometimes I look back and I am shocked. Everyday of my life I have prepared for success, worked for it, waited for it, and you don't notice how the days pass until nearly a lifetime is finished. Then it hits you--the thing you have been waiting for has already gone by. And it was going in the other direction. It's like I've been waiting on the wrong side of the road for a bus that was already full." p. 265”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“…I've had a bad week."
What's happened?"
Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“The most important aspect of Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the surrounding influence and qualities produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to give our attention to, and it is the one thing that is continually under attack.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, Updated Edition

“I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain… Or so says the legend.”
― Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps...As prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody's next year's split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.”
― Emily Giffin, Love the One You're With

“where you are. is not who you are. – circumstances”
― Nayyirah Waheed, salt.

“What I feel—I shouldn't show you,
so when you're around I won't;
I know I've no right to feel it
but it doesn't mean I don't.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“Wounded

A bruise is tender
but does not last,
it leaves me as
I always was.

But a wound I take
much more to heart,
for a scar will always
leave its mark.

And if you should ask me
which you are,
my answer is -
you are a scar.”
― Lang Leav

“He walked into my life and slowly, gently he showed me how to smile again, how to start living again. He gave me a reason to breathe again. Showed me that living was worth it and it was worth fighting for. That it was worth taking a risk and making the choices you wanted to make. That he was choosing me, fighting for me and he wanted me to fight for him, for us.”
― Natalie Ward, I Love You to Death

“I trace the lines of his tattoos in a way that I know distracts him. I run my hands over his smooth, warm skin. I kiss him now, making him breathless. I lie there listening to his heart beat and I’m still so hungry for him. I feel more alive than ever.”
― Natalie Ward, I Love You to Death