Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“I will share your joy and sorrow / Till we’ve seen this journey through.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome—a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Bereavement is not the truncation of married love,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Relying on his own strength and the support of his family and community, Paul faced each stage of his illness with grace—not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would “overcome” or “beat” cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one. He cried on the day he was diagnosed. He cried while looking at a drawing we kept on the bathroom mirror that said, “I want to spend all the rest of my days here with you.” He cried on his last day in the operating room. He let himself be open and vulnerable, let himself be comforted. Even while terminally ill, Paul was fully alive; despite physical collapse, he remained vigorous, open, full of hope not for an unlikely cure but for days that were full of purpose and meaning.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I DID my life - one thing to do after another, always something else to do. Because you don't need a heart to DO, but you do need one to live.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Where the River Runs

“You need to take care of the root in order to heal the tree. - Gullah Proverb”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Where the River Runs

“She would not have understood, then, that time is not linear but circular. There is no past, present, future. Roya was the woman she was today and the seventeen-year-old girl in the Stationery Shop, always. She and Bahman were one, and she and Walter were united. Kyle was her soul and Marigold would never die.”
― Marjan Kamali, The Stationery Shop

“If they could open their hands and release the old guide ropes to which they had always clung—anger and timidity, lonesomeness and fear, judgment and the fear of being judged—they would free their spirits to seek and find a new way of being, new eyes through which to see.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

“A life is substantially more curious, and mundane, than the reports would have it. And in truth, though I am known—within the tiny dewdrop circles of the unlikely few who know of me—as a solitary, unmatched Arctic hunter, I am no such thing, and I was seldom alone.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“Always discriminating in her affections, she clearly liked something about the Finnishman’s smell: fastidiously devoid of human odor, but a little metallic, like wind blown across corrugated tin.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“if you never allow for the possibility that someone might care for you on your own merit, their way of demonstrating it will always feel unusual or inadequate”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“Poor conversation, or even its lack, murders the finer machinations of the mind,”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“Fate is empty. Any Arctic explorer or common sailor can tell you this. So you must make the best choices you can, knowing they may lead you astray, but proceeding boldly lest your life become one long monotonous drift between death and your last interesting choice.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“allow me to say that if you never allow for the possibility that someone might care for you on your own merit, their way of demonstrating it will always feel unusual or inadequate.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“The skill of moving silently through the landscape is like music,” he told her. “Almost you make me feel less a teacher and more a musician.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“But in my experience it’s rarely the parting that is memorable, unless it’s a death. They are always hurried, awkward affairs. Never enough time to say what you wish you had said. You must trust that your feelings are known, and that you will be remembered as you were.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“It is quite something to feel sure that you’re alone in the world, and then to recall that you are not.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“She felt rather than saw Bruce frowning.”
― Lisa Unger, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six

“I didn’t understand depression, how it was a con and a thief of joy. How it lured people away, making them believe that the world was better off without them.”
― Lisa Unger, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six

“Why did people think that was okay, to kill something and stick its head on your wall?”
― Lisa Unger, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six

“Beware that, when fighting monsters,
you yourself do not become a monster.” —Friedrich Nietzsche”
― Lisa Unger, Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six

“That the beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘It is not the length of life, but the depth of life.’ You don’t need a long lifetime to make an impact on this world. You just need the will to do so.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“Once you know something, you forget what it was like to not know it.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“Its not the length of life, but the depth of life”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“The measure of your life lies within.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“We already put the art first, the food first, the passion first,” she explained, a sweep of her arm encompassing the entire shop. “And we already put the family first. We did not need the strings to tell us what is most important.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“You don’t need a long lifetime to make an impact on this world. You just need the will to do so.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure

“The woman shrugged. “I hear of these Americans, they say the strings have made them think again about their lives. How do you say, their . . .” “Priorities?” Maura offered. “Sì, sì. Their priorities. But, in Italy, I think we already knew. We already put the art first, the food first, the passion first,” she explained, a sweep of her arm encompassing the entire shop. “And we already put the family first. We did not need the strings to tell us what is most important.”
― Nikki Erlick, The Measure