Ash > Ash's Quotes

“I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let's think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can't ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment's notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow- that's vulnerability. Love is uncertain. It's incredibly risky. And loving someone leaves us emotionally exposed. Yes, it's scary, and yes, we're open to being hurt, but can you imagine your life without loving or being loved?”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”
― Anne Lamott

“Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really get answers. You just get better questions.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“No, it's not, Holmesy. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don't choose what's in the picture, but you decide the frame.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways pain is the opposite of language.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracise and minimise. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Life is a series of choices between wonders.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else's body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they though would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“When you're on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“It's turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You're trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that's not how it works.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“The illusion that the self is separate from the rest of the world is the driving factor that limits our potential. Once you realize there's nothing special about the self, it becomes easier to manipulate.”
― F.C. Yee, The Rise of Kyoshi

“They twist the meaning of justice to absolve themselves of conscience.”
― F.C. Yee, Avatar: The Rise of Kyoshi

“This isn’t spiritualism,” he said. “You don’t have to believe. You simply have to practice.”
― F.C. Yee, Avatar: The Rise of Kyoshi

“People shouldn't have everything they want. No one is entitled to their every desire. To live in balance, we must willingly decide not to take all that we can from the world, and from others.”
― F.C. Yee, The Shadow of Kyoshi

“You either accept the risk of winning, or the guarantee of losing.”
― F.C. Yee, The Shadow of Kyoshi

“Weakness is practiced and learned as much as strength is!”
― F.C. Yee, The Shadow of Kyoshi

“Isn't it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse