Karen > Karen's Quotes

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.”
― John Muir

“Nothing truly wild is unclean.”
― John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

“Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“If you’re afraid you can’t write, the answer is to write. Every sentence you construct adds weight to the balance pan. If you’re afraid of what other people will think of your efforts, don’t show them until you write your way beyond your fear. If writing a book is impossible, write a chapter. If writing a chapter is impossible, write a page. If writing a page is impossible, write a paragraph. If writing a paragraph is impossible, write a sentence. If writing even a sentence is impossible, write a word and teach yourself everything there is to know about that word and then write another, connected word and see where their connection leads.”
― Richard Rhodes

“Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements--and this is untrue.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“[Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestionably accepted.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
― Ken Kesey

“If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“My little old dog
a heart-beat
at my feet”
― Edith Wharton

“Freedom begins between the ears.”
― Edward Abbey

“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”
― Edward Abbey, The Best of Edward Abbey

“A drink a day keeps the shrink away.”
― Edward Abbey

“Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on Earth has it worse than an Emperor penguin.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”
― Michael Crichton

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.”
― Amy Hempel

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“A roll of the dice will never abolish chance.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé