Charlene > Charlene's Quotes

“For you, a thousand times over”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated...”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“People say that eyes are windows to the soul.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“I will follow you to the ends of the world.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Blood is a powerful thing”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“To be who you are and become what you are capable of is the only goal worth living.”
― Alvin Ailey

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
― Audre Lorde

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
― Audre Lorde

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.”
― Audre Lorde

“The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
― Audre Lorde

“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”
― Audre Lorde

“There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.”
― Audre Lorde

“Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.”
― Audre Lorde

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

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

“I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”
― Wislawa Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading

“The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.”
― audrey hepburn