Raywei > Raywei's Quotes

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“The Camino points to something more fundamental, to a way of thinking about self and others that looks inward past window-dressing and the usual social identifiers. Pilgrims leave behind professional and social tags when they enter the Camino. Here we're fellow human beings. Period. Often I know only the first name and nationality of people I meet on the trail, sometimes not even that, and with our standard pilgrim attire, we don't offer the usual visual cues to who we are and what we do in life. Yet we affect each other in profound ways. On this level playing field, we talk easily about whatever is on our minds, and the insights from strangers can be surprisingly perceptive. The French pilgrim at Compostelle 2000 (the Paris pilgrim association) was on to something when she told me that the Camino is more than a physical place. It does present breathtaking encounters with the land itself, but it also pushes me to look beyond the physical world.”
― Katherine B. Soper, Steps Out of Time: One Woman's Journey on the Camino

“How does one exorcise painful memories so the good ones can take front and center stage? How do you get beyond regrets that can't be fixed? How easy it is to put off hard conversations, to forget that the only time you can count on with certainty is the present moment.”
― Katherine B. Soper, Steps Out of Time: One Woman's Journey on the Camino

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“7 The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance. He is the creature of an evolution who can just about span a sufficient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness. Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion: Enriched edition. Uncovering the Influence of Media on Societal Beliefs and Democratic Discourse