Carolyn > Carolyn's Quotes

“When you're young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand new penny, but before you get to wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good long look, because that may be as far as you're ever going to go.”
― Robert Goolrick, Heading Out to Wonderful

“The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things you can pinpoint the day, the hour, the minute. When you think about it, though, those things, mostly seem to happen to other people.


This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I am going to tell it to you. It's a true story as much as six decades or telling and remembering can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don't always get everything right. You remember a little thing clear as a bell, the weather, say, or the splash of light on the river's ripples as the sun was going down into the black pines. things not even connected to anything in particular, while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than the big things.”
― Robert Goolrick, Heading Out to Wonderful

“I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do?”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living, was in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object. A shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face. ”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“We tend to go on loving the things the people who loved us loved. They are invested with soul, even if the people are long dead, even if they do not turn out to be who you thought they were.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.”
― Maya Angelou

“I know that I am not the only person who is alone in the world. I know that others sorrow in the night. That others pick up a razor and slice into their own skin, with greater or lesser success. I know that others look at their lives and see only silent failure and disconsolation, feeding the cat, checking their email, doing the crossword. I know that I am not the only person to have lived a life like mine. I am aware. (212)”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”
― E.E. Cummings

“John Andrew Holmes, “No exercise is better for the human heart than reaching down and lifting another up.”
― Tim Sanders, Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours.
In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.”
― Maya Angelou

“Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”
― Woody Allen

“Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.”
― John Green

“Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
― Miller Williams

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“We all do better when we work together. Our differences do matter, but our common humanity matters more.”
― Bill Clinton