Jenni Plumer > Jenni's Quotes

“But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that’s dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be—even about yourself—may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven.”
― Sue Miller, While I Was Gone

“I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.”
― Sue Miller, While I Was Gone

“But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.”
― Sue Miller

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“A library is infinity under a roof.”
― Gail Carson Levine

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.”
― Chris Bohjalian, Midwives

“There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending

“There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending

“Sometimes you know before you know.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Range of Motion

“Never be afraid of doing the thing you know in your heart is right, even if others don't agree.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Dream When You're Feeling Blue

“I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better....”
― Chris Bohjalian, Secrets of Eden

“...You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog