Carl > Carl's Quotes

“He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;
Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;
Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;
Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;
Who has left the world better than he found it,
Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;
Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;
Whose life was an inspiration;
Whose memory a benediction.”
― Bessie Anderson Stanley, More Heart Throbs Volume Two in Prose and Verse Dear to the American People And by them contributed as a Supplement to the original $10,000 Prize Book HEART THROBS

“We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form saying, "We need bread."....If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls were expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm."

It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.”
― Dorothy Day

“I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.

It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.

I never was so unhappy, never felt so great the sense of loneliness. No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter, for His sake, I had to do it over again.

Tamar is partly responsible for the title of this book in that when I was beginning it she was writing me about how alone a mother of young children always is. I had also just heard from an old woman who lived a long and full life, and she too spoke of her loneliness”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice

“Everything Man sees he takes for a toy.
Thus is he always, forever a boy.”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

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

“Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progress—any combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwise have lingered for decades. And this must be especially so, when those with newfound power are men who distrust any form of hesitation or nuance, and who prize self-assurance above all.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“physical healing happens so fast; it is the rest that takes time.”
― Eric Lomax, The Railway Man

“I didn’t understand yet that there are experiences you can’t walk away from, and that there is no statute of limitations on the effects of torture.”
― Eric Lomax, The Railway Man

“I didn’t understand yet that there are experiences you can’t walk away from, and that there is no statute of limitations on the effects of torture.”
― Eric Lomax, The Railway Man

“It said, “There seems to be an absence in him of deep emotional response, coupled with an inability to profit from experience. He is the kind of individual who is subject to committing asocial acts with impunity. He lacks a sense of guilt, he seems bereft of a strong conscience, and he appears incapable of emotionally close or mutually cooperative relationships with women. “Derivatively, he apparently avoided, even resented, the demands on him to fulfill the responsibilities of having been a husband and a father of female children. Parenthood, for him, may have been viewed as threatening and potentially destructive.” The report also said, “He is subject to being amnesic concerning what he would wish to blot out from his consciousness and very conscience. His credibility leaves much to be desired. In testing, he proved himself to be considerably pathological and impulsive, with feministic characteristics and concealed anger. He has a disdain for others with whom he differs and he is subject to respond with anger when his person is questioned, on whatever basis.”
― Joe McGinniss, Fatal Vision: A True Crime Classic

“For my father, the myth of Cassandra had been just another way he sought to guide me toward what he thought I needed to know. In some versions, Cassandra's fate is that she is merely misunderstood--not unlike what my father imagined to be the obvious fate of a mixed-race child born in a place like Mississippi. "She was a prophet," he told me, "but no one would believe her." Over the years, though, this second naming would come to weigh heavily on me. It was as if, in giving me that name, he had given me not only the burden of foresight but also the notion of causation--that whatever it was, if I could imagine it, see it in my mind's eye, it would happen because I had envisioned it. As if I had willed it into being.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“The way you got sideswiped was by going back. —JOAN DIDION”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Frost wrote, “is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. . .”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Memory knows before knowing remembers,” William Faulkner wrote.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“You’ll never be happy with what you want until you
can be happy with what you’ve got.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop

“No matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder

“She said we are all part of a secret club. Someday, she said, we will take over the earth. It will be people like us that save the world, she said: those who have walked the side of sorrow and seen the dawn.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder

“It will be people like us that save the world, she said: those who have walked the side of sorrow and seen the dawn.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder

“This is something I know: no matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder

“Stop thinking that you have to know everything to understand it.”
― Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder

“Life wasn’t always about making the right choices. Sometimes it was about making the wrong ones just to see what would happen.”
― Brianna Labuskes, A Familiar Sight

“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person. Everything that happens to one, happens to the other. If one gets married, the other is along for the ride. Otherwise, they are different. They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.” She stopped for a nearer example. “Or optimism and pessimism.”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

“Great people, and artists, and extraordinary men and women have dramatically different Alpha and Omega. Of course, so do the feebleminded, the addictive, and the psychotic.” Something in the certainty of her voice was making me dogged. “How do you account, then,” I asked, “for the difference between an artist and a psychotic?” “The quality of inner communication, of course. If Alpha and Omega are incredibly different, but can manage all the same to express their separate needs and perceptions to each other, then you have an extraordinary person. Such people can find exceptional solutions. Artists, especially. You see, when Alpha and Omega don’t communicate, then one or the other must become the master or there’s a standstill. So the loser becomes oppressed. That’s a desperately inefficient way of living.” “Like totalitarianism?” “Precisely.”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

“There seems to be endless capacity for strife in your system.” “Of course there is. Doesn’t that fit human nature?”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost