Nancy > Nancy's Quotes

“Pop said once that relationships are more often like old houses—the place where you want to live, but an ongoing project—something always leaking, peeling away, breaking down.”
― Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?

No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Thus all good architecture and good decoration (which, it must never be forgotten, is only interior architecture) must be based on rhythm and logic.”
― Edith Wharton

“These thieves and lovers and wandering poets—what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“By this time of course reading itself was slipping into shadow. There was a sinuous mistrust of text and its defenders. The country had recently elected its first proudly illiterate president, A MAN UNSPOILT as he constantly bellowed, and this chimp was wildly popular everywhere he went.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“You’re a man who stops and listens. If that’s not the definition of friendship, it’s close enough for now.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.”
― Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse

“You cannot submit to evil without allowing evil to grow. Each time the good are defeated, or each time they yield, they only cause the forces of evil to grow stronger. Greed feeds greed, and crime grows with success. Our giving up what is ours merely to escape trouble would only create greater trouble for someone else.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Man Called Noon