Halina Goldstein > Halina's Quotes

“I am a part of all that I have met.”
― Alfred Tennyson, The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”
― Ken Kesey, Kesey's Garage Sale

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
― Mark Twain

“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
― Lao Tsu, Tao Teh Ching

“Somewhere, out in the world, are the people who touched us, or loved us, or ran from us. In that way we will live on. If you go to the places we have been, you might meet someone who passed us once in a corridor but forgot us before we were even gone. We are in the back of hundreds of people's photographs - moving, talking, blurring into the background of a picture two strangers have framed on their living room mantelpiece. And in that way, we will live on too. But it isn't enough. It isn't enough to have been a particle in the great extant of existence. I want, we want, more. We want for people to know us, to know our story, to know who we are and who we will be. And after we've gone, to know who we were.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

“We have practiced for death every night. Lying down in the dark and slipping into that place of nothingness between rest and dreams where we have no consciousness, no self, and anything could befall our vulnerable bodies. We have died each night. Or at least, we have laid down to die, and let go of everything in this world, hoping for dreams and morning.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

“There are souls in this world who have the gift of finding joy everywhere, and leaving it behind them when they go.”
― Frederick William Faber

“By love, I mean filling herself
with small right intentions. By life,
I mean she looks at you from the railings.
A kind of dare is in her, her tail curled
like a bass clef, or mutant fern.
You won't catch her. She's scrolling
from scent to sound to slightest motion.
However the light moves
might be ruin, or rich enough to rob.
The way she ransacks, hoards, loses,
lashes, bluffs the crouched cat,
the unleashed dog, her death,
a dozen times a day, is what I mean
by hopeless how she loves this life.”
― Max Garland, The Word We Used For It

“There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour, our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes solid as bone.”
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“...they do quote me, that means that my words and my sentences get under their skins although they do no know it.”
― Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi , The Essential Rumi

“Perhaps our dreams are there to be broken, and our plans are there to crumble, and our tomorrows are there to dissolve into todays, and perhaps all of this is all a giant invitation to wake up from the dream of separation, to awaken from the mirage of control, and embrace whole-heartedly what is present. Perhaps it is all a call to compassion, to a deep embrace of this universe in all its bliss and pain and bitter-sweet glory. Perhaps we were never really in control of our lives, and perhaps we are constantly invited to remember this, since we constantly forget it. Perhaps suffering is not the enemy at all, and at its core, there is a first-hand, real-time lesson we must all learn, if we are to be truly human, and truly divine. Perhaps breakdown always contains breakthrough. Perhaps suffering is simply a right of passage, not a test or a punishment, nor a signpost to something in the future or past, but a direct pointer to the mystery of existence itself, here and now. Perhaps life cannot go 'wrong' at all.”
― Jeff Foster

“An imbalance in our economy is an imbalance in our relationship with the world. As we change, our world changes”
― Halina Goldstein, Joyful Economy

“Abundance and joy is not something outside of you—it is not something you have to achieve—it is something that is you and which you therefore uncover.”
― Halina Goldstein, Joyful Economy

“It’s a luxury to be the owner of one’s time. I think it’s one of the greatest luxuries human beings can afford themselves.”
― Valérie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers

“You're no longer where you were, but you are everywhere that I am.”
― Valérie Perrin, Cambiare l'acqua ai fiori

“We think that death is an absence, when in fact it's a secret presence.”
― Valérie Perrin, Cambiare l'acqua ai fiori

“We never meet people by chance. They are destined to cross our paths for a reason.”
― Valérie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers

“You must learn to be generous with your absence to those
who haven’t understood the importance of your presence.”
― Valérie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers

“When we miss one person,
everywhere becomes deserted.”
― Valérie Perrin, Fresh Water for Flowers

“Tears come when you’ve been too strong for much too long.”
― Hazel Prior, How the Penguins Saved Veronica

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.”
― Ali Smith