"A great deal of life will always suck."
Katherine May, Wintering
"No matter how much the deceased were loved, life did not wait for the grieving. Though on the inside everything would change and what used to matter fell away, the routine and ordinary remained unchallenged."
T.A. Willberg, Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder
"God give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude."
Sarah Hagi
Pauline Harmange, I Hate Men
"May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more."
John O'Donohue
Elizabeth Lesser, Cassandra Speaks
"Sometimes it is the part of us that is not like others that makes us special, that is our talent. I would go so far to say sometimes it is the antisocial piece, the part that makes it hard to be the hit of the party, that makes us wonderful. It was very hard for me to get to that part and make it my own."
Sharon Stone, The Beauty of Living Twice
"The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'"
Brian Eno
"It's not what enters men's mouths that's evil. It'comes what comes out of their mouths that is."
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"If a person is living out his Personal Legend, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time."
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"There is but one thing of real value - to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger, in the midst of lying and unjust men."
Marcus Aurelius
"There is nothing inherently sinful about being human... There's nothing sinful about the body, or sex, or sexuality. Being human isn't a punishment, or something we need to endure, or transcend. Being human is the whole point."
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
"...it wasn't the bible that terrified me, it was the way it has been interpreted."
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
"...similar to the power of lust, or the realm of the flesh, anger is healing. To feel and express anger feels healthy. Anger creates appropriate boundaries with people who aren't supporting us or who aren't good for us to be around. Anger can flood the system with a sense of clarity and purpose. We sometimes know what we stand for and what we care about most about from the presence of anger. Anger protects us and often protects others we love and those who can't defend themselves. Anger, for anyone who has been silenced or made to feel insignificant, is a declaration that they actually matter. That their voice matters. That they are not to be silenced ever again. Anger in these situations is holy Anger in the face of injustice is an act of love. It's a statement of unifying ourselves with a stranger saying, "I won't let you be treated as I would not want to be treated myself." Anger can be motivating and unifying. As the mystic William Blake relates, "The voice of honest indignation is the voice of god."
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
"...we cannot believe in ourselves if we don't remember that we are worthy of that belief."
Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
"...the real beauty lies in the achievement, not the attainment, of a goal. Trying to hold on to the achievement lessens the value of the achievement itself, and can even blemish it. The enjoyment is in the process and the celebration of the achievement and what it represents. It can never be recreated or reformed, because then it would be something new and different. In order to really achieve something, there is no attainment. It's gone the moment you reach the achievement."
Hillary Allen, Out and Back
"When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go... and then you know you're winning."
Greta Thunberg
"ekki hugsa"
Ólafur Arnalds
"Sometimes it's not the errors you make but how you recover from them that mark the difference between failure and success."
Anne Perry, Treachery at Lancaster Gate
"Nothing stays damaged for long. Everything is fixable. Except people."
Gareth L. Powell, Embers of War
"Sometimes it's better to be useful than heroic, better to bathe in gratitude than glory, and better to serve than demand services."
Gareth L. Powell, Fleet of Knives
"I think you're all broken in some fundamental way, but you're not all broken in the same place. And it's the ways you each find to work around those breaks that make you who you are."
Gareth L. Powell, Fleet of Knives
"That's the reason she thought so many of them yearned to believe in gods and saviours; deep down, they knew that left to their own devices, they'd never be mature enough to solve their own problems or cleave to ideals they claimed to champion."
Gareth L. Powell, Fleet of Knives
"What I call 'understanding' turns out to be 'managing my ignorance more effectively.'"
Brian Eno
"I hate her death for how it knocked my family down, but I hate also how I believe I needed it to become who I am."
Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts
"What is grief if not the act of survival? How can it be anything else but persisting through an enormous loss? After my mother's death, I learned quickly that I would need to parent myself or find parents in others. It became easier over the years; not because my father became more nurturing, but because I'd become an adult."
Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts
"It is amazing how returning to this house is stepping into a warped time machine; the parent-child dynamics remain the same, the behaviors that, for much of high school, I grew to accept. Now, though, I fight against this resentment, the way neglect stings and hurts and feels, often, personal: both like a condemnation and reflection of how much love one deserves."
Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts
"Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you."
Tim Harford, TED: How Frustration Can Make Us More Creative
"...people busied themselves with habit and ritual to avoid thinking about the awful truth - that they were no more discarded toys in an abandoned house, and only those who accepted that their world and their lives were a cosmic joke and laughed at it and found new games to play could be truly free."
Paul McAuley, War of the Maps
"People our age sometimes have the foolish notion that they must prove that they have not been brought low by time ... After living full and useful lives, they suddenly realize that the end of the road is only a little way ahead of them. They begin to fear that they are no longer relevant. That the world is moving on without them. They believe that there may yet be time for one more grand adventure, want to prove that they can still make a mark and win respect. But an important part of growing old is accepting without regret that all lives end in some kind of failure. We never do everything we hoped to do, or do what we have done as well as we would have liked."
Paul McAuley, War of the Maps
"Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence."
Lu Xun, The Epigrams of Lusin ( The Wisdon of China and India)
"Stupidity is knowing the truth, seeing the truth but still believing the lies. And that is more infectious than any other disease."
Richard Feynman
"Takin' on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse. If you're comfortable while you're doin' it, you're probably doin' it wrong."
Tony Hawk
"That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing. That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood."
Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
"I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. But I reject the idea that you can't be a deep human being without it or any of them."
Brian Eno
"...overexposing myself has always felt like the safest option. Strip yourself naked so it seems like no one else can strip you down; hide nothing, so that no one can use your secrets to hurt you."
Emily Ratajkowski, My Body
"Philosophy is engineering by another name."
Gareth L. Powell, Light of Impossible Stars
"If history is only what is seen, what do we call the rest?"
Questlove, Music is History
"...if you look at history is a part of the right (and the Right) narrative. Behind every politician on the Right is a tree that, if shaken, has forbidden fruit falling."
Questlove, Music is History
"What you risk reveals what you value."
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
"The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you're apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times."
Brian Eno