Brix > Brix's Quotes

“Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“purple does something strange to me”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have A Family

“The world’s magic sneaks up on you in secret, settles next to you when you have your head turned.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have A Family

“Funny how you think people are one way or the other and most of the time you end up completely wrong.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have A Family

“Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he'd said, she disagreed and though instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn't feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what's left crumbles to dust.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“All we can do is play our parts and keep each other company.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have A Family

“This is the pivot between youth and age, the
thrilling place where everything seems visible, feels possible, where plans are made. On the one side you have childhood and adolescence, which are the murky ascent, and, on the other, you have the decline that is adulthood, old age, the inch-by-inch reckoning of that grand, brief vision with earthbound reality.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Wounds can sing a beguiling song.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“It isn’t restlessness, or a desire to be somewhere else, but a blunt recognition that her time in this place has expired.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have A Family

“Some people, she decided, magically surface in these horrible moments knowing exactly what to do, which spaces to fill.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you'll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there's no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

“This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world.”
― Daniel H. Pink, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
― Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

“Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family

“And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day.”
― Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family