Nicole Steiner > Nicole's Quotes

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Nothing Twice: Selected Poems / Nic dwa razy: Wybór wierszy

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I won't desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won't confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath. I will breathe fresh air while I learn, all over again, grace freely given and wisdom honored; and when my fingers fumble, whenI sound flat or sharp, I will simply try again.”
― Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women

“There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I don't want to imagine meadows, I want to run through them”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."...That is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended...Poets, if they're genuine, must always keep repeating "I don't know.”
― Wisława Szymborska

“Quick, make a wish.
Take a (second or third or fourth) chance.
Remake the world.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“There should be a horn or gong or something to wake God. Because I’d like to have a word with him. Three words actually: WHAT THE FUCK?!”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“We know ourselves only as far as we’ve been tested.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Map: Collected and Last Poems

“We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Here

“As I released my anger more often and more consciously, the cycle of depression ended. I began to express the anger when my friend Betty and I got together and talked (she is good about letting me rant without interrupting). I pounded pillows. I poured the anger into my journals. I let it come. Yet anger needs not only to be recognized and allowed; like the grief, it eventually needs to be transformed into an energy that serves compassion. Maybe one reason I had avoided my anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. We can allow anger’s enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy. Anger can fuel our ability to challenge, to defy injustice. It can lead to creative projects, constructive behavior, acts that work toward inclusion. In such ways anger becomes a dynamism of love.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

“I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to. The rewards of finding and maintaining balance are neither immediate nor permanent. They require patience and maintenance. We must be willing to move forward despite being uncertain of what lies ahead. We must have faith that actions today that seem to have no impact in the present moment are in fact accumulating in a positive direction, which will be revealed to us only at some unknown time in the future. Healthy practices happen day by day. My patient Maria said to me, “Recovery is like that scene in Harry Potter when Dumbledore walks down a darkened alley lighting lampposts along the way. Only when he gets to the end of the alley and stops to look back does he see the whole alley illuminated, the light of his progress.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for it's own sake, leads to anhedonia. Which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Lessons of the balance.
1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, leads to pain.
2. Recovery begins with abstinence
3. Abstinence rests the brains reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy and simpler pleasures.
4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine overloaded world.
5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain.
6. Pressing on the pain side, resets our balance to the side of pleasure.
7. Beware of getting addicted to pain.
8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy and fosters a plenty mindset.
9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe.
10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“[E]mpathy without accountability is a shortsighted attempt to relieve suffering.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful. That meant future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted. The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place. “Relationships”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“The results of the study were astoundingly clear: The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood. And their risk for contracting diseases didn’t go up just a few percentage points. People with high ACE scores were about three times as likely to develop liver disease, twice as likely to develop cancer or heart disease, four times as likely to develop emphysema.[2] They were seven and a half times more likely to become alcoholics, four and a half times more likely to suffer from depression, and a whopping twelve times more likely to attempt suicide.[3] Scientists have learned that stress is literally toxic. Stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline surging through our bodies are healthy in moderation—you wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning without a good dose of cortisol. But in overwhelming quantities, they become toxic and can change the structure of our brains. Stress and depression wear our bodies out. And childhood trauma affects our telomeres. Telomeres are like little caps on the ends of our strands of DNA that keep them from unraveling. As we get older, those telomeres get shorter and shorter. When they’ve finally disappeared, our DNA itself begins to unravel, increasing our chances of getting cancer and making us especially susceptible to disease. Because of this tendency, telomeres are linked to human lifespan. And studies have shown that people who suffered from childhood trauma have significantly shortened telomeres.[4]”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air