Kathy > Kathy's Quotes

“Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this and you would find it very interesting to watch. It's quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on Earth you picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek, as if it were a nice kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out the prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.”
― James Matthew Barrie

“Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.”
― Thomas A. Edison, Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The same point is made by the Hasidic Rabbi, Susya, who shortly before his death said, "When I get to heaven they will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' Instead they will ask 'Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could become?”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“By their very nature, human being are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration -- and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
― Amor Towles

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“...the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow. There”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“But, alas, sleep did not come so easily to our weary friend. Like in a reel in which the dancers form two rows, so that one of their number can come skipping brightly down the aisle, a concern of the Count’s would present itself for his consideration, bow with a flourish, and then take its place at the end of the line so that the next concern could come dancing to the fore.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all human interaction. What young lovers have not found themselves at this juncture in a silence so sudden, so seemingly insurmountable that it threatens to cast doubt upon their chemistry as a couple? What husband and wife have not found themselves suddenly unnerved by the fear that they might not ever have something urgent, impassioned, or surprising to say to each other again?”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Whether through careful consideration spawned by books and spirited debate over coffee at two in the morning, or simply from a natural proclivity, we must all eventually adopt a fundamental framework, some reasonable coherent system of causes and effects that will help us make sense not simply of momentous events, but of all the little actions and interactions that constitute our daily lives–be they deliberate or spontaneous, inevitable or unforeseen.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, 'Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn't die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that's not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn't be anything left that would think of itself as an "I." No point of view any longer, because you'd be an infinite sequence of views and points...”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Humility is the power to admit that you may be wrong. Admitting to false beliefs is not weakness, it is the first step on the path to truth. And make no mistake, there is no such thing as individual truth, only individual perception. Perception is subjective, but truth isn’t.”
― Richard Paul Evans, The Noel Letters

“most people don’t want truth. They want confirmation.”
― Richard Paul Evans, The Noel Letters

“A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”
― Sidney Sheldon

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night.
You can only see as far as your headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctrow

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse

“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“Are you angry with the bird because he can fly, or angry with the horse for her beauty, or angry with the bear because he has fearsome teeth and claws? Because he’s bigger than you are? Stronger too? Destroying all the things you hate won’t change any of that. You still won’t be a bear or a bird or a horse. Hating men won’t make you a man. Hating your womb or your breasts or your own weakness won’t make those things go away. You’ll still be a woman. Hating never fixed anything. It seems simple, but most things are. We just complicate them. We spend our lives complicating what we would do better to accept. Because in acceptance, we put our energies into transcendence.”
― Amy Harmon, Where the Lost Wander

“Put your energy into rising above the things you can’t change, Naomi. Keep your mind right. And everything will work out for the best.”
― Amy Harmon, Where the Lost Wander

“That’s what hope feels like: the best air you’ve ever breathed after the worst fall you’ve ever taken. It hurts.”
― Amy Harmon, Where the Lost Wander

“It is impossible to explain to someone who is surrounded by their own language and people just how lonely it is to not understand and to not be understood.”
― Amy Harmon, Where the Lost Wander

“Thinking takes time. Feeling . . . not so much. Feeling is instant. It's reaction. But thinking? Thinking is hard work. Feeling doesn't take any work at all. I'm not saying it's wrong. Not saying it's right either. It just is. How I feel . . . I can't trust that, not right away, because how I feel today may not be how I feel tomorrow. Most people don't want to think through things. It's a whole lot easier not to. But time in the saddle gives a man lots of time to think.”
― Amy Harmon, Where the Lost Wander