Norma Vasquez > Norma's Quotes

“People assign value to the strangest things.  I do it all the time.  I keep the Petoskey stone in my pocket that Carolyn gave to me 20 years ago.  Eliot gave me a Buddhist prayer wheel and Carol gave me a necklace with a Brazilian pendant of a hand twisted into a thumb-up good luck sign.”
― Debra Samson, Between

“I wonder how they’ll do without me.  They’ll do fine.  Holes are made, holes are filled—they’re”
― Debra Samson, Between

“I was so glad that I went to that service.  It gave me the chance to put an end mark on it, and reaffirmed my belief that, in some small way, each of us can make a difference when it comes to pushing against the usual, the standard operating procedure.  We have a chance to change the impersonal treatment we receive, even if we have to do it one little step at a time.” The”
― Debra Samson, Between

“When I was doing my undergraduate African studies, I learned of a belief among the Yoruba of West Africa.  They believed that when you were thinking of someone, that person was really visiting with you, “staying” with you right where you were.  In your letter you said you regretted not being here to be among us.  I guess in my rather clumsy way, I want you to know that you are here with us,”
― Debra Samson, Between

“For why is gambling a whit worse than any other method of acquiring money? How, for instance, is it worse than trade? True, out of a hundred persons, only one can win; yet what business is that of yours or of mine?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

“This complete ignorance of the realities, this innocent view of mankind, is what, in my opinion, constitutes the truly aristocratic. For”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

“even if a gentleman should lose his whole substance, he must never give way to annoyance. Money must be so subservient to gentility as never to be worth a thought. Of course, the SUPREMELY aristocratic thing is to be entirely oblivious of the mire of rabble, with its setting; but sometimes a reverse course may be aristocratic to remark, to scan, and even to gape at, the mob (for preference, through a lorgnette), even as though one were taking the crowd and its squalor for a sort of raree show which had been organised specially for a gentleman's diversion. Though”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

“Who fears the wolf should never enter the forest. What?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

“I seem to be afraid of any SERIOUS book—afraid of permitting any SERIOUS preoccupation to break the spell of the passing moment. So dear to me is the formless dream of which I have spoken, so dear to me are the impressions which it has left behind it, that I fear to touch the vision with anything new, lest it should dissolve in smoke. But”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

“VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it. VLADIMIR”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“We could start all over again perhaps. ESTRAGON: That should be easy. VLADIMIR: It’s the start that’s difficult. ESTRAGON: You can start from anything. VLADIMIR: Yes, but you have to decide. ESTRAGON”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? VLADIMIR: (impatiently). Yes yes, we’re magicians.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say?”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He
went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He
took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student – thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield”
― William Butler Yeats

“We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I climb into bed and grab the stuffed alligator tight. Sometimes the Internet tells you more than you want to know.”
― Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

“All of life’s problems come from attachment. When you let go of being attached to things, or needing things, a sense of peace comes over you like I can’t describe.”
― Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

“If I can’t figure out why I’m here, then I’m just taking up space.”
― Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

“We are essentially a beautiful fluke, as are the millions of other species with which we share this planet. Our cells are composed of atoms and dust particles from distant galaxies, and from the billions of living organisms that inhabited this planet before us.”
― Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

“At the end of the world will be bacteria, cockroaches, and Peeps.”
― Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

“the miracle is the note between two notes of music, it is the number between number one and number two. To have it all you have to do is need it. Faith — is knowing you can go and eat the miracle. Hunger, that is what faith is in itself — and needing is my guarantee that to me it will always be given. Needing is my guide.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“The more we need, the more God exists.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.