“Whatever we’re wrestling with personally comes out in our work.”
“Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.”
“One of the advantages to getting older, though: while you might not change all that much, you at least got to know yourself. The real you, minus the bullshit and wishful thinking.”
“Her Kind I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.”
“Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”
“Wildflower; pick up your pretty little head, It will get easier, your dreams are not dead.”
“Sometimes it is good to be in uncomfortable situations because it is in finding our way out of such difficulties that we learn valuable lessons.”
“A diamond doesn t start out polished and shining. It once was nothing special, but with enough pressure and time, becomes spectacular. I m that diamond.”
“Sometimes we know in our bones what we really need to do, but we re afraid to do it. Taking a chance and stepping beyond the safety of the world we ve always known is the only way to grow, though and without risk there is no reward.”
“Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don t know. I ve forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn t matter, so long as you move.”
“You will never be entirely comfortable. This is the truth behind the champion - he is always fighting something. To do otherwise is to settle.”
“Personal growth has its price, and she was paying it without complaint.”
“By daily dying, I have come to be.”
“The day is ending. It s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, Let go.”
“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
“It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.”