Lauren > Lauren's Quotes

“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“What power has love but forgiveness?
In other words
by its intervention
what has been done
can be undone.
What good is it otherwise?”
― William Carlos Williams

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“The road of life is strewn with the bodies of promising people. People who show promise, yet lack the confidence to act. People who make promises they are unable to keep. People who promise to do tomorrow what they could do today. Promising young stars, athletes, entrepreneurs who wait for promises to come true. Promise without a goal and a plan is like a barren cow. You know what she could do if she could do it, but she can't. Turn your promise into a plan. Make no promise for tomorrow if you are able to keep it today. And if someone calls you promising, know that you are not doing enough today.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Acts of Faith: Daily Meditations for People of Color

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Their issues are not your issues.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman's Guide Through Life's Dilemmas

“Many of us learned that passivity lessened the possibility of attack.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n'ani ji onwe ya: "He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”
― Nelson Mandela

“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Farthest Shore

“Change is freedom, change is life.

It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.

There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”
― Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.”
― Rumi, Words of Paradise: Selected Poems of Rumi

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
― Rumi

“A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

“No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planet,lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Sit, be still, and listen,
because you're drunk
and we're at
the edge of the roof.”
― Rumi

“Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis