Candy Spender-van Rood > Candy's Quotes

“What happens in the heart, simply happens”
― Ted Hughes

“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own”
― Mary Oliver

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.”
― Mary Oliver

“What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.”
― Mary Oliver

“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe -- to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it -- is a wonder beyond words.”
― Joanna Macy

“The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies. ”
― Joanna Macy

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“We can hardly bear to look. The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived. Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“If you just set people in motion they'll heal themselves.”
― gabrielle roth, Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman

“Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.”
― Joanna Macy

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.”
― Mary Oliver

“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?”
― Gabrielle Roth

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Rumi: “Dancing is not rising to your feet painlessly like a whirl of dust blown about by the wind. Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul.”
― Gabrielle Roth, Connections: The Threads of Intuitive Wisdom

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Use the flowing rhythms to feel your fear; use staccato to feel and express anger, chaos for sadness, lyrical for
joy, stillness for compassion. The rhythms catalyze each emotion and each stage of each emotion.”
― Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman

“Economists have calculated that every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”
― Rachel Carson

“All healing journeys begin and end in the body.”
― Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman

“A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred.In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists.

I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become thevictor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing then it is the eternal
dance or creation. The creator and creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing...and dancing...and dancing. Until there is only...the dance.”
― Michael Jackson

“Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is -- whether its victim is human or animal -- we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.”
― Rachel Carson

“The journey towards oneness emphasizes the opposites and we are caught in their conflict.”
― Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Bond with the Beloved: The Mystical Relationship of the Lover & the Beloved

“There is a time to struggle to achieve what we want and a time to give up any desire, a time to be strong and a time to surrender one’s strength.”
― Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Awakening the World: A Global Dimension to Spiritual Practice

“The wise have inherited wisdom by means of silence and contemplation.”
― Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Travelling the Path of Love: Sayings of Sufi Masters

“To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance.”
― Pina Bausch

“Life is an interdependent living organism that reflects the collective consciousness of humanity.”
― Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Awakening the World: A Global Dimension to Spiritual Practice