Juliane Roell > Juliane's Quotes

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

“After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America

“You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.”
― Natalie Goldberg, The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.”
― Ken Wilber

“Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
She laughed. 'Really?'
The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.”
― Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

“The History Of The Universe In Three Words

CHAPTER ONE
Bang!

CHAPTER TWO
sssss

CHAPTER THREE
crunch.

THE END”
― Iain M. Banks

“He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Remember the motto: ‘Work hard, play hard.’ Regard your personal time as just as important as your work time and give as much attention to planning it as you do to planning your work. What are you working for if you don’t have a personal life?”
― Mark Forster, Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management

“We therefore tend to rely on willpower alone. This never works because the ideal sequence above is opposed by a stronger and more primitive one: Stimulus – Reaction. Without the right structures to keep it under control, Stimulus – Reaction will always tend to overwhelm Thought – Decision – Action.”
― Mark Forster, Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management

“A clear vision is as much about what you are not going to do as it is about what you are going to do.”
― Mark Forster, Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management

“There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.”
― John Green

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
― Martin Buber

“It is important to note that the relevant factor to sexual harassment in this story is not gender identity but gender perception. Some friends and acquaintances who have experienced harassment do not, in fact, identify as women; they were perceived as women. As I sought support, the key issue was not their gender identity, but the gender signifiers that led them to be perceived as women. If we don’t admit that sexual harassment is a gendered experience, we can never shed light on the sexism implicit in many cases of harassment. However, in addressing these sorts of gendered experiences, we may find that gender identity is not the most useful category.”
― Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

“If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance,” I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-youdidn’t” sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us.

Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other people started reading me as female, they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience—with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions—completely off the hook.”
― Julia Serano, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

“Being a living trans person means vigilance. For a non-passing trans person, there is no safe space. It is not who we are kissing, but our very heights, our voices, and the size of our hands that catalyze hatred and violence. Forget activism; simply negotiating one’s world every day, constantly judging, adjusting, scanning one’s surroundings, and changing clothes to go from one role to another can be overwhelming.

Add to that cases of family disownment, poverty, homelessness, HIV. When a recent study of transgender youth reports that half their sample had entertained thoughts of suicide, and a quarter of them had made at least one attempt, I am not surprised.”
― Ryka Aoki

“You can optimize everything and still fail, because you have to optimize for the right things. That's where reflection and qualitative approaches come in. By asking why, we can see the opportunity for something better beyond the bounds of the current best.
Even math has its limits.”
― Erika Hall, Just Enough Research

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.”
― Iain M. Banks

“There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
― Pablo Picasso