Susan Wright > Susan's Quotes

“Luck is seldom as haphazard as it may seem. It means being at the right place at the right time, and most of all, it means being prepared to take advantage of opportunities.”
― Bernd Heinrich, Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds

“You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn’t quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake’s radiance, which would be my preference.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy because she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the sort of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“As artists, we distort the truth and create the most amazing theories; we create entire philosophies and the most amazing religions; we create stories and superstitions about everything, including ourselves. And this is exactly the main point: We create them.”
― Miguel Ruiz, The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery

“was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms.”
― Joan D. Chittister, Between the Dark and the Daylight: Embracing the Contradictions of Life

“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Absolute power, which denies this right of appeal, is purely and simply incompatible with a Civil Society; and Divine Right, which Catholic teachers are always insisting upon, entirely fails to justify the contention that any one man may control the lives and destinies of all the rest. Power should be controlled, and divided, as in Great Britain, into legislative and executive. If the executive power failed to act in accordance with the purposes for which it was set up, if it encroached upon the liberties of the people, it must be taken out of the hands of the person wielding”
― Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face.”
― Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge

“Outside, the fields were shaking off their sleep and the first rays of sunlight were cutting the peaks of the cordillera like the thrusts of a saber, warming up the earth and evaporating the dew into a fine white foam that blurred the edges of things and turned the landscape into an enchanted dream. Blanca set off in the direction of the river. Everything was still quiet. Her footsteps crushed the fallen leaves and the dry branches, producing a light crunching sound, the only noise in that vast sleeping space. She felt that the shaggy meadows, the golden wheatfields, and the far-off purple mountains disappearing in the clear morning sky were part of some ancient memory, something she had seen before exactly like this, as if she had already lived this moment in some previous life. The delicate rain of the night had soaked the earth and trees, and her clothing felt slightly damp, her shoes cold. She inhaled the perfume of the drenched earth, the rotten leaves, and the humus, which awakened an unknown pleasure in all her senses.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“I have no doubt that humanity will get over this war, but I know for certain that I and my contemporaries will see the world cheerful no more.” Ominously, he concluded that “since we can only regard the highest present civilization as burdened with an enormous hypocrisy, it follows that we are organically unfitted for it. We have to abdicate, and the Great Unknown, He or It, lurking behind Fate will someday repeat this experiment with another race. I know that science is only apparently dead, but humanity seems to be really dead.”
― Matthew Von Unwerth, Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk

“You can transform your nation into a prison because you are committed to an ideology.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life

“What would yield the greater benefit to mankind: if I spent the afternoon taking stock in my dispensary, or if I went to the beach and took off my clothes and lay in my underpants absorbing the benign spring sun, watching the children frolic in the water, later buying an ice-cream from the kiosk on the parking lot, if the kiosk is still there? What did Noël ultimately achieve labouring at his desk to balance the bodies out against the bodies in? Would he not be better off taking a nap? Maybe the universal sum of happiness would be increased if we declared this afternoon a holiday and went down to the beach, commandant, doctor, chaplain, PT instructors, guards, dog-handlers all together with the six hard cases from the detention block, leaving behind the concussion case to look after things. Perhaps we might meet some girls. For what reason were we waging the war, after all, but to augment the sum of happiness in the universe? Or was I misremembering, was that another war I was thinking of?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“Love is always partly a misunderstanding’;”
― Matthew Sturgis, Oscar: A Biography

“People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“When apparent stability disintegrates, As it must— God is Change— People tend to give in To fear and depression, To need and greed. When no influence is strong enough To unify people They divide. They struggle, One against one, Group against group, For survival, position, power. They remember old hates and generate new ones, They create chaos and nurture it. They kill and kill and kill, Until they are exhausted and destroyed, Until they are conquered by outside forces, Or until one of them becomes A leader Most will follow, Or a tyrant Most fear.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

“In a dizzying shift of perspective, Rune suddenly feels he has become the leper: it’s Rune who looks out through scarred, opaque corneas; Rune who sees cloudy, smeared images with no edges; Rune who discerns light and shadow but remembers what it was like to have moonlight fall on his face; those are Rune’s misshapen, ulcerated feet wrapped in bloodied gunnysack that is secured with coir rope . . . The moment passes. He has no explanation for what just happened, the sense of being momentarily embodied in another.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“The figure departs, swallowed by the night, the tap of staff against stone receding. In a rush of clarity Rune sees all the things the leper could not: the distant horizon where sea meets sky, the sky that suspends the moon, and the moon with the shawl of stars draped around it . . . He feels himself disappear in the capaciousness of the universe. He has become the sagging net, the blind leper who must sleep under the stars . . . In the immensity of the cosmos, Rune feels he himself is nothing, an illusion. The difference between him and the leper is no difference at all, they are just manifestations of the universal consciousness.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“When the bond between heaven and earth is broken, even prayer is not enough. Only a story can mend it.”
― Rabbi Baal Shem Tov