Jaymi > Jaymi's Quotes

“The great mother whom we call Innana gave a gift to woman that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon’s birth - to men, this is flux and distemper, bother and pain. They imagine we suffer and consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them.

In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses through us, cleansing the body of last month’s death, preparing the body to receive the new month’s life, women give thanks — for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?”
― Neil Gaiman

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Stories are about secrets. We all have them. Secret dreams, fantasies, hopes and sometimes even desires. Occasionally a dream becomes reality and then maybe there are a million reasons for not telling anybody about it.”
― Rob Hopcott

“Stories change us; they change the world. People are stories of themselves.”
― Karen Healey, Guardian of the Dead

“I will not compare myself with others, nor them with me. I will appreciate myself and others for what I and they contribute.”
― Gail Blanke, Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life

“All losers are romantics. It's what keeps us from blowing our brains out.”
― Richard Kadrey, Butcher Bird

“If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“In the moment before I crossed over, I knew that the priests and magicians of Egypt were fools and charlatans for promising to prolong the beauties of life beyond the world we are give. Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. All of life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.”
― Anita Diamant

“Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious.

Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know.

Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work.

Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear.

Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again.”
― Ripley Patton

“To honor and celebrate; or to balance and rectify, drawing what you want or need into your life. A third mode is less personal, involving a desire to know more deeply, involving a desire to know more deeply, to grow in knowledge and understanding of the cards--breathing in the wisdom of the tarot for its own sake and to learn more about life and the human condition.”
― Cait Johnson, Tarot for Every Day: Ideas and Activities for Bringing Tarot Wisdom into Your Daily Life

“The future is an imaginary solution to the problem of the present and the tarot offers imaginary solutions to the problem of our lives. It does so by having us swerving away from our remorse about the past and our anxiety about the future, into the increasingly rare experience of the present. The tarot is one of the fastest ways we have to get where we were not going.”
― Enrique Enriquez

“Witchcraft promotes the advantages of learning and applying new symbolism into one's psyche, this is the witches code.”
― Gede Parma, Spirited: Taking Paganism Beyond the Circle

“Magick is the life force of the natural world, and thus Magick is raw and neutral.”
― Gede Parma, Spirited: Taking Paganism Beyond the Circle

“The nature of Paganism is that of exploring, evolution, and opening up.”
― Gede Parma, Spirited: Taking Paganism Beyond the Circle

“Qabalah is a portrait of what it means to be human, what it means to be divine and exist. That is what the theory of Qabalah is meant to accomplish. And tarot is that same exact portrait, done as a deck of cards. It is a portrait of the workings of the invisible universe.”
― Wald Amberstone

“Creation is messy. You want genius, you get madness; two sides of the same coin.”
― Steve Jobs

“Tarot is a lyrical language of the soul's encounter with the Universe. It arises freely, and like the most dignified dance, allows us to express ourselves in motion to the music of the divine. The re-arrangement and reading of the deck is as sacred as the most religious ritual or act of love. Treasure it. Trust it. Let it divine you.”
― Marcus Katz, Tarot Inspire

“Here is one reason I think we always need new tarot decks being created. I think of tarot decks as similar to myths and so I think this quote applies: "Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them." Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth”
― Barbara Moore

“The stories of tarot are the reason for its existence. With a deck of cards, we can tell the stories of where we come from, how it is that we are here, what awaits us, and what we will or might become. Tarot tells the story that we are made in a divine image, and that the world (at least the world as we experience it) is made in that same image, so that in some subtle way God, humanity, and the world are all the same shape and are made of the same things. if that is true, then to be a student of tarot is to be a student of everything.”
― Wald Amberstone

“If you push me too far, you may believe I'm real.”
― Jack Off Jill

“To learn to play seriously is one of the great secrets of spiritual exploration.”
― Rachel Pollack, The Forest of Souls: A Walk Through the Tarot

“God," in these pages, becomes a way to express our universal desire to know and to comprehend the sacred.”
― Rachel Pollack, The Forest of Souls: A Walk Through the Tarot

“It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Language and literature allows us to define our own truths using our perceptions of culture and society.”
― T. MacLaughlin