Evelien Daveyne > Evelien's Quotes

“He thought it was a bit rich of Uncle Vernon to call anyone “dumpy,” when his own son, Dudley, had finally achieved what he’d been threatening to do since the age of three, and become wider than he was tall.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“To be a woman is a great adventure;
To drive men mad is a heroic thing.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”
― Tara Westover

“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”
― Tara Westover , Educated

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“I had only one desire: to leave, to walk, to die, whatever. I wanted to get away, never come back, disappear, melt away into the forest, the clouds, no longer have memories, forget, forget.”
― Ágota Kristof, Yesterday

“The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.”
― Arthur Koestler

“I loathe the telephone - vile, shrill-voiced intruder. i'd never answer it at all if I didn't feel I might be missing something: a million-pound offer from a film company or Robert Mitchum asking me out to lunch. I hate the element of uncertainty - you never know if it's going to be a friend or a foe on the line. I wish they'd invent a telephone which turned green like a breath-test when it was an enemy ringing, so I needn't answer it.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“Our house is so difficult to find that people always arrive late, which means that by the time we go into dinner, I've had so many dry Martinis I'm practically under the piano, and it no longer seems to matter that I haven't put the potatoes on.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“I'm going to get absolutely plastered tonight, darling. i love you so much, I want to see two of you.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“I adore watching other people in restaurants, beautiful people toying with steak tartare, hoping to be recognized, married couples eating but not talking, lovers eating each other, illicit couples ducking nevously behind the celery and the gristicks every time the door opens, children doing more whining than dining, storing food in the corners of their cheeks like cherubs at the corner of old maps, then suddenly spraying spinach all over the snow-white tablecloth.”
― Jilly Cooper, Jolly Super

“People are going to be sent to prison for saying somebody’s common soon, aren’t they? Really. You can’t say anybody’s fat, you can’t say anybody’s anything, now. Not that one wants to say people are fat, but mind you, they are huge, aren’t they. Enormous. Enormous. I hate people being hurt. But nobody can say anything now. Anyway, enough of that. And all this [anti] wolf-whistling. I love being wolf-whistled at. I’m that generation. All contributions gratefully received.”
― Jilly Cooper

“tears have a purpose. they are what we carry of the ocean, and perhaps we must become the sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.”
― Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

“John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: 'There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.' Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body....

Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

“Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do.”
― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

“There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.”
― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

“Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.”
― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

“Nothing is more precious than loving the life you make for yourself, and nothing is worse than making a life and trying to fit within its parameters as an afterthought.”
― Tami Lynn Kent, Wild Creative: Igniting Your Passion and Potential in Work, Home, and Life

“Mothering is a true spiritual path in that it will expand your spirit, make painfully visible your personal limitations, and bring some of the greatest heart-opening moments of bliss”
― Tami Lynn Kent, Wild Mothering: Finding Power, Spirit, and Joy in Birth and a Creative Motherhood