Suzanne > Suzanne's Quotes

“only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced.”
― John Keats

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
― Maya Angelou

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“And still, after all this time,
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe Me."

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.”
― Hafiz

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
― Rumi

“Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Operation Self-Esteem--Day Fucking One.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Often times, a person will think they know you by piecing together tiny facts and arranging those pieces into a puzzle that makes sense to them. If we don't know ourselves very well, we'll mistakenly believe them, and drift toward where they tell us to swim, only to drown in our own confusion.
Here's the truth: it's important to take the necessary steps to find out who you are. Because you hold endless depths below the surface of a few facts and pieces and past decisions. You aren't only the ripples others can see. You are made of oceans.”
― Victoria Erickson

“Just because you are soft doesn't mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the colour gold.”
― Victoria Erickson, Edge of Wonder: Notes from the Wildness of Being

“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

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich

“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
― Adrienne Rich

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end.”
― Adrienne Rich

“But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“We mothers have a wonderfully precious and truly powerful role to play in the future self-images of our daughters. The truth is, the most effective way to inculcate in our daughters a fighting chance at life-long self-love and empowerment is not in the books we read to them, or the workshops we send them to, or the media we do or do not expose them to, or even the things we tell them, rather it is in the reflection of self-love and empowerment they see in us, their mothers. The model of our own empowerment gives our daughters permission to be powerful. Of course, culture and societal norms mold our view of ourselves as women, but the beliefs and behaviors of our mothers are far more influential.”
― Melia Keeton-Digby, The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle

“Like a detective keenly searching for clues, our daughters are solving the mystery of womanhood itself.”
― Melia Keeton-Digby, The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle

“May We Love Ourselves.
May We Love Each Other.
May We Believe that Our Dreams Can Come True.
We Are Strong.
We Are Wise.
We Are the Heroines of our Own Lives
-The Heroine’s Club benediction”
― Melia Keeton-Digby, The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle

“Like seeds planted in the depths of our souls, our dreams are at the center of who we really are. Our mission and our right is to nurture them and to allow them to grow. To follow your dreams takes courage, action, persistence, time and patience, but most of all, you must first believe in them. Believing in your dreams means that you trust your aspirations exist for a reason and the reason is your calling. Believing in your dreams means that you hold true that everything is possible and you can manifest the life and experiences you desire.

We know that dreaming is a form of planning. We know that everything we enjoy and appreciate around us – every advancement and contribution to society – developed from the commitment, perseverance, and belief in our dreams.”
― Melia Keeton-Digby, The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle

“Mothers and daughters together are a powerful force to be reckoned with”
― Melia Keeton-Digby, The Heroines Club: A Mother-Daughter Empowerment Circle

“So I am not a broken heart.
I am not the weight I lost or miles or ran and I am not the way I slept on my doorstep under the bare sky in smell of tears and whiskey because my apartment was empty and if I were to be this empty I wanted something solid to sleep on. Like concrete.
I am not this year and I am not your fault.
I am muscles building cells, a little every day, because they broke that day,
but bones are stronger once they heal and I am smiling to the bus driver and replacing my groceries once a week and I am not sitting for hours in the shower anymore.
I am the way a life unfolds and bloom and seasons come and go and I am the way the spring always finds a way to turn even the coldest winter into a field of green and flowers and new life.
I am not your fault.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”
― Neil Gaiman

“it is being honest
about
my pain
that
makes me invincible.”
― Nayyirah Waheed