Shan Raine > Shan's Quotes

“You did not carry yourself
away from pain
to become pain itself.”
― Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

“1. You must let the pain visit.
2. You must allow it teach you
3. You must not allow it overstay.

(Three routes to healing)”
― Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

“We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts”
― A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine

“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.”
― A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine

“Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.”
― Sarah Kay

“Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night”
― Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage: Poems

“Some people read palms to tell your future, but I read hands to tell your past. Each scar makes a story worth telling. Each callused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory.”
― Sarah Kay

“Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried.”
― Sarah Kay, B

“There is a shipwreck between your ribs and it took eighteen years
for me to understand how to understand your kind of drowning.
There are people who cannot be held quietly. There are screams
that are never externalized. If I looked at the photo albums of your
past twenty years, all I would find are decibel meter graphs of
phone calls and the intensity of your silence as you sat
smoking cigarettes in the garage.

There is a shipwreck between your ribs. You are a box with
fragile written on it, and so many people have not handled you
with care.

And for the first time, I understand that I will never know
how to apologize for being
one of them.”
― Shinji Moon

“I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not
as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people
that leave different shades of blue inside of me.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I am trying to teach poetry in school districts
that only know how to starve. I am trying
to show my students, who don't know

how to spell, how to write their lives
in anything but blood. I am trying to learn
how to give and foster forgiveness in a body

that wants none of it.”
― Sierra DeMulder, Today Means Amen

“Mantra to Overcome Depression

Vitamin D. Sunlight. Go
outside. Get a good night

of sleep. Not too good.

Not shades drawn forever
good. Not like you used to.

Open the windows.

Buy more houseplants.
Breathe. Meditate. One day,

you will no longer be

afraid of being alone
with your thoughts.

Exercise. Actually exercise

instead of just Googling it.
Eat well. Cook for yourself.

Organize your closet, the

garage. Drink plenty of
water and repeat after me:

I am not a problem

to be solved. Repeat after me:
I am worthy I am worthy

I am neither the mistake nor

the punishment. Forget to take
vitamins. Let the houseplant die.

Eat spoonfuls of peanut butter.

Shave your head. Forget
this poem. It doesn't matter.

There is no wrong way

to remember the grace of your
own body; no choice

that can unmake itself.

There is only now, here
look: you are already

forgiven.”
― Sierra DeMulder, Today Means Amen

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

(This quote is probably wrongly attributed to Sylvia Plath)”
― Sylvia Plath