Rachel | All the RAD Reads > Rachel | All the RAD Reads's Quotes

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”
― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

“To always know how quickly life could change, how quickly everything important could disappear, to always be trying to feel this unexpectedly beautiful life to its core.”
― Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

“Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“You change your life when you start showing up exactly as you are. You change your life when you become comfortable with being happy here, even if you want to go forward. You change your life when you can love yourself even though you don’t look exactly the way you want to. You change your life when you are principled about money and love and relationships, when you treat strangers as well as you do your CEO, and when you manage $1,000 the same way you would $10,000. You change your life when you start doing the truly scary thing, which is showing up exactly as you are. Most of the problems that exist in our lives are distractions from the real problem, which is that we are not comfortable in the present moment, as we are, here and now. So we must heal that first.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

“I like good strong words that mean something…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James