Barbara > Barbara's Quotes

“Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...
If we had known who we really were.”
― Julia Cameron

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

“You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
― Joan Didion

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.”
― Richard Russo

“And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Look for what you notice but no one else sees.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Tyrants tell stories only about themselves because history for them begins and ends with their own insatiable appetites.”
― Jamie Raskin, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy