Shep > Shep's Quotes

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If I ever form a clan, we'll be the anti-cheerleaders and walk under the bleacher forming mild acts of mayhem.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishing frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one is certain.

And yet, there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given - so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we image that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer. Thus destroyers topple empires; make a canvas of clean rubble where creators then can build another world. Rubble, once achieved, makes further ruins' means irrelevant.

Away with our explosives, then!

Away with our destroyers! They have no place within our better world.
But let us raise a toast to all our bombers, all our bastards, most unlovely and most unforgivable.

Let's drink their health... then meet with them no more.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Her heart had grown so familiar to the pain of life without him, that to respond now seemed too large a pleasure she could not endure. If pain was love, then she loved fiercely. Yet knew she could not be near that boy again.”
― Jamie Weise

“Growth in love comes from a place of absence, where the imagination is left to it’s own devices and creates you to be much more then reality would ever allow.”
― Jamie Weise

“And I don’t even like you, but the pain of life without you is biting.”
― Jamie Weise

“I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“Sometimes your very existence seems nothing, sometimes its your shadow I yearn for or a glimpse of it.”
― ehddah

“Though I forget things about me all the time, I never forget a thing about you...”
― Danya Krish

“Miss you?" He grated the incredulous question, dropping his mouth to her temple. "You left me without a soul. I can barely remember the days since you left. They passed without me feeling a single thing. Because you are feeling for me. You're the only thing that keeps me from being numb. Twice in my life you've turned me back into a living, breathing man, and missing you... missing you, Peggy, doesn't even begin to cover it. You revive me.”
― Tessa Bailey, Too Hard to Forget

“I was missing you, but not for the person you were. I was missing you for the version of you I made up in my mind. I was missing the possibilities of what could have been. I was missing the potential I thought I saw in you. I was missing you for the glimpses I thought I saw of our future and for that hopes I had that I could be a girl worth changing for.”
― Liz Newman

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“She looks at the swings, and I can see she’s imagining what they’d look like if the kids weren’t there. The guilt of this holds her down momentarily. It appears to be there constantly. Never far away, despite her love for them.

I realize that nothing belongs to her anymore and she belongs to everything.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was—and am—innocent.” The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.”
― Rosamund Lupton, Sister

“It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn’t last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates’ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects. These may be messages from God or tricks of the eye, but in neither case are we permitted to ignore them.”
― Anna Godbersen, The Luxe

“When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Guilt is a useless feeling. It's never enough to make you change direction--only enough to make you useless.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Another Faust

“The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life

“And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our act. Everything turns on our intentions.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

“There was more than one type of guilt. You might do something horrible that you later regretted. But you could also feel guilty for something you'd not done!”
― Joseph Delaney, I Am Alice

“I would forget it fain,
But oh, it presses to my memory,
Like damnèd guilty deeds to sinners' minds.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.”
― James Baldwin

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver