Sunili > Sunili's Quotes

“Okay, babe, okay, I didn’t mean for it to be such a big deal,” he said.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Love was a country he knew nothing about.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“I’m beginning to view democracy as the Siri of political systems. So much better in theory.”
― Rob Thomas, Mr. Kiss and Tell

“Life is nothing but high school.” —Kurt Vonnegut”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“(In 2006, social psychologist Bella DePaulo, PhD, coined the word singlism to mean “the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single.”)”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“We need much better and many more models. We need movies where women are attractive and interesting and have great lives and may not be married.” She cautioned that conjuring possible selves on our own isn’t enough—institutional support is also necessary. “Schools, workplaces, laws, norms, the media—they all need to make it clear that there are other ways to be a woman or a member of one minority group or another.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“Being a wife and mother wasn’t just plan A; it was the only plan. To live otherwise meant to live without a template, consigned to the margins, discouraged from seeking a new and different happiness.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“What bothered me was the assumption that because I was a woman in her early thirties, I must be “desperate” for marriage. At first this seemed only irritating; every romantic encounter arrived in the same cumbersome frame I had to repeatedly dismantle. But after a while, the fixedness of this belief felt not merely claustrophobic and repetitive but downright pernicious.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“I was uncertain about what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew it would have something to do with the lives of the poor, America’s history of racial inequality, and the struggle to be equitable and fair with one another. It would have something to do with the things I’d already seen in life so far and wondered about, but I couldn’t really put it together in a way that made a career path clear.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption

“My short time on death row revealed that there was something missing in the way we treat people in our judicial system, that maybe we judge some people unfairly. The more I reflected on the experience, the more I recognized that I had been struggling my whole life with the question of how and why people are judged unfairly.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption

“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption

“It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption

“I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption

“In 1896 the newspaperwoman Nellie Bly asked Susan B. Anthony if she’d ever been in love. Her answer: “Bless you, Nellie, I’ve been in love a thousand times! But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“a way certain women (and there weren’t all that many of them) thought of themselves in relation to the social order— specifically, as those women who chose to remain celibate rather than compromise their integrity by marrying merely for social or economic gain. By rejecting “the self-abnegation inherent in domesticity,” they engaged in the “cultivation of the self,” upholding the single life “as both a socially and personally valuable state,” and “through the choice against marriage, articulated the values of female independence.”
― Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

“If you want crappy things to stop happening to you, then stop accepting crap and demand something more. —CRISTINA YANG, GREY’S ANATOMY”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral. Pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring, and dreams are not real. Just . . . DO.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“It may be different for you. Your happy place. Your joy. The place where life feels more good than not good. It doesn’t have to be kids. My producing partner Betsy Beers would tell me that for her that place is her dog. My friend Scott would probably tell me that for him it is spending time being creative. You might say it’s being with your best friend. Your boyfriend, your girlfriend. A parent. A sibling. It’s different for everyone. For some of you, it might even be work. And that, too, is valid. This Yes is about giving yourself the permission to shift the focus of what is a priority from what’s good for you over to what makes you feel good.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“Badassery: 1.   (noun) the practice of knowing one’s own accomplishments and gifts, accepting one’s own accomplishments and gifts and celebrating one’s own accomplishments and gifts; 2. (noun) the practice of living life with swagger : SWAGGER (noun or verb) a state of being that involves loving oneself, waking up “like this” and not giving a crap what anyone else thinks about you. Term first coined by William Shakespeare.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“It’s not bragging if you can back it up,” I whisper to myself in the shower every morning. That is my favorite Muhammad Ali quote. If you ask me, Ali invented modern-day swagger.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“The goal is that everyone should get to turn on the TV and see someone who looks like them and loves like them. And just as important, everyone should turn on the TV and see someone who doesn’t look like them and love like them. Because perhaps then they will learn from them. Perhaps then they will not isolate them. Marginalize them. Erase them. Perhaps they will even come to recognize themselves in them. Perhaps they will even learn to love them.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“People really do not like it when you decide to step off the road and climb the mountain instead. It seems to make even the people who mean well nervous.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. For not living up to some standard we think applies across the board to all of us. We all spend our lives trying to follow the same path, live by the same rules. I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“You are offered the potential of opening up into the as-yet unknown, the much bigger world where there are smells you’ve never smelled, there are sights you’ve never seen, and there are sounds you’ve never heard. What you could experience is so much vaster than what you currently experience. Let’s go in that direction. TS:”
― Pema Chödrön, Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: Wise Advice for Leaning into the Unknown

“The question is, are you going to grow or are you going to just stay as you are out of fear and waste your precious human life by status quo-ing instead of being willing to break the sound barrier? Break the glass ceiling, or whatever it is in your own life? Are you willing to go forward? I suggest finding the willingness to go forward instead of staying still, which is essentially going backward, particularly when you have a calling in some direction. That calling needs to be answered. And it’s not necessarily going to work out the way you want it to work out, but it is taking you forward, and you are leaving the nest. And that never can be a mistake—to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that’s in there. TS:”
― Pema Chödrön, Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: Wise Advice for Leaning into the Unknown

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
― David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World

“A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis", i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning