Estela > Estela's Quotes

“Those who cannot acknowledge themselves will eventually fail.”
― Masashi Kishimoto

“...people live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true... that is how they define reality. But what does it mean to be correct or true? Merely vague concepts... their reality may all be an illusion.”
― Kishimoto Masashi Uchiha Itachi - chapter 385

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think life asks more of you than watching TV.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“It rather goes without saying that Katherine drank her coffee black. Katherines do, generally. They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“That’s what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn’t fill the hole that losing her created.’
‘Maybe no girl can fill it.’
‘Right. Being a world-famous Theorem-creator wouldn’t, either. That’s what I’ve been thinking, that maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers…”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“His terrible hunger he’d thought would be sated was not. The end apparent in the beginning.
‘My wife,’ he said. ‘Mine.’ Perhaps instead of wearing her, he could swallow her whole…
‘Stop,’ she said. She’d lost her smile, so shy and constant that he was startled to see her up close without it. ‘Nobody belongs to anybody. We’ve done something bigger. It’s new.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“In the front room, a two-story flutter, love notes from the German Frau’s first marriage barely tethered to a structure so it shifted in the wind, one tiny home movie projected on each. A sculpture of marriage, marriage come alive.
Lancelot felt tears start to his eyes. It was so exactly right. The Germans saw the gleam, and both of them--like budgerigars on their perch--sidled up and hugged Lancelot around the waist.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“[Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.]”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him: she knew it when she saw him up on that windowsill the night before, the lightning shocking the world behind him. His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Acceptance is not passivity. It is a courageous step in the process of transformation.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“To start, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, “Stay.” Does the puppy listen? It gets up and runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. “Stay.” And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over, and pees in the corner or makes some other mess.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“Because love, compassion, and joy can lead to excessive attachment, their warmth needs to be balanced with equanimity. Because equanimity can lead to excessive detachment, its coolness needs to be balanced with love, compassion, and joy. Established together, these radiant qualities express mental harmony.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“We were young and the focus on human suffering gave our retreats gravitas. But suffering is not the goal, it is the beginning of the path. Now in the retreat I teach, I also encourage participants to awaken to their innate joy. From the very beginning I encourage them to allow the moments of joy and well-being to deepen, to spread throughout their body and mind. Many of us are conditioned to fear joy and happiness, yet joy is necessary for awakening. As the Persian mystic Rumi instructs us, ‘When you go to a garden, do you look at thorns or flowers? Spend more time with roses and jasmine.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“Attachment is conditional, offers love only to certain people in certain ways; it is exclusive. Love, in the sense of metta, used by Buddha, is a universal, nondiscriminating feeling of caring and connectedness.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“The Buddhist approach to this collective suffering is to turn toward it. We understand that genuine happiness and meaning will come through tending to suffering. We overcome out own despair bby helping other to overcome theirs.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“If we are still suffering, how can we teach other to be free? Ajahn Chah replied, ‘First of all, be very honest. Don’t pretend that you are wise in ways you are not. Tell people how you are yourself. And then take the measure of things. In weightlifting, if you’re strong, you know that through practice you can lift a really big weight. Maybe you’ve seen someone lift a weight bigger than you can. You can tell your students, ‘If you practice, you can lift that big weight, but don’t try it yet. I can’t even do it, but I’ve seen people do it.’ Be willing to express what is possible without trying to fool someone that you’ve done it.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“Feel your own precious body and life. Let yourself see the way you have hurt or harmed yourself. Picture them, remember them. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this and sense that you can release these burdens. Extend forgiveness for each of them, one by one.”
― Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

“Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“There is, by the way, an area in which a man's feelings are more rational than in his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time. You might sneer at this, but I know now. I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus, I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.”
― Ralph Ellison