Sylvia > Sylvia's Quotes

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  • #1
    Fred Rogers
    “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
    Fred Rogers

  • #2
    Marion Zimmer Bradley
    “Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.”
    Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House

  • #3
    Paul Bowles
    “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
    Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

  • #4
    Virginia Woolf
    “I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”
    Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters

  • #5
    Charles Bukowski
    “Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
    Hemingway testing his shotgun
    Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
    the impossibility of being human
    Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
    Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
    the impossibility of being human
    Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
    Mailer stabbing his
    the impossibility of being human
    Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
    Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
    Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
    the impossibility
    Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
    Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
    Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
    the impossibility
    Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
    Chatterton drinking rat poison
    Shakespeare a plagiarist
    Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
    the impossibility the impossibility
    Nietzsche gone totally mad
    the impossibility of being human
    all too human
    this breathing
    in and out
    out and in
    these punks
    these cowards
    these champions
    these mad dogs of glory
    moving this little bit of light toward us
    impossibly.”
    Charles Bukowski

  • #6
    Jenny  Lawson
    “When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #7
    Jenny  Lawson
    “Like my grandmother always said, “Your opinions are valid and important. Unless it’s some stupid bullshit you’re being shitty about, in which case you can just go fuck yourself.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #8
    Jenny  Lawson
    “Because you are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. And because there is joy in embracing - rather than running from - the utter absurdity of life.”
    Jenny Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

  • #9
    Neil Gaiman
    “I decided that I would do my best in the future not to write books just for money. If you didn't get the money then you didn't have anything. If I did the work I was proud of and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.”
    Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
    tags: art

  • #10
    Neil Gaiman
    “I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something.”
    Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art

  • #11
    Neil Gaiman
    “Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”
    Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art

  • #12
    Jenny  Lawson
    “Don’t sabotage yourself. There are plenty of other people willing to do that for free.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #13
    Jenny  Lawson
    “Don’t make the same mistakes that everyone else makes. Make wonderful mistakes. Make the kind of mistakes that make people so shocked that they have no other choice but to be a little impressed.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #14
    Jenny  Lawson
    “Last month, as Victor drove me home so I could rest, I told him that sometimes I felt like his life would be easier without me. He paused a moment in thought and then said, “It might be easier. But it wouldn’t be better.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #15
    Jenny  Lawson
    “Depression is like … when you don’t want cheese anymore. Even though it’s cheese.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #16
    Jenny  Lawson
    “Pretend you’re good at it.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #17
    Jenny  Lawson
    “I can’t think of another type of illness where the sufferer is made to feel guilty and question their self-care when their medications need to be changed.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #18
    Jenny  Lawson
    “I wish someone had told me this simple but confusing truth: Even when everything’s going your way you can still be sad. Or anxious. Or uncomfortably numb. Because you can’t always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect.”
    Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

  • #19
    Jeannette Walls
    “One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.”
    Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
    tags: life

  • #20
    Jeannette Walls
    “Things usually work out in the end."
    "What if they don't?"
    "That just means you haven't come to the end yet.”
    Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

  • #21
    Jeannette Walls
    “....he said it was interesting. He used the word 'textured'. He said 'smooth' is boring but 'textured' was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever had tried to hurt me.”
    Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

  • #22
    Jeannette Walls
    “I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
    Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

  • #23
    Jeannette Walls
    “Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential.”
    Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

  • #24
    Jeannette Walls
    “No one expected you to amount to much," she told me. "Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.”
    Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

  • #25
    Maria Semple
    “That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.”
    Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

  • #26
    Maria Semple
    “My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I'm going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I'm about to kick the shit out of life.”
    Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

  • #27
    Jodie Archer
    “commentators found the Fifty phenomenon irritating”
    Jodie Archer, The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel

  • #28
    Matt Haig
    “It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
    It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
    But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
    We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
    Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

  • #29
    Michael McCreary
    “Having autism is like having too many tabs open on a computer. Or more accurately, it’s like trying to surf the web without an ad blocker. Every time you click on something, another window pops up.”
    Michael McCreary, Funny, You Don't Look Autistic: A Comedian's Guide to Life on the Spectrum

  • #30
    Michael McCreary
    “Having autism is a characteristic, not a character.”
    Michael McCreary, Funny, You Don't Look Autistic: A Comedian's Guide to Life on the Spectrum



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