Kitt O'Malley > Kitt's Quotes

“Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.”
― Herman Hesse

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Losing your mind is hardly an elegant affair. When the mind goes, it is best to wear some kind of bib. Spiritual spit-up happens. It just does.”
― Greg Archer, Grace Revealed: a memoir

“Street signs became messages from God. Ideas became revelations. Feverous with a mission, not to assuage but to save, I started crying during sermons And laughing when I was alone.”
― Tony E Roberts, Delight in Disorder: Ministry, Madness, Mission

“God does not expect more from us than we can achieve. God knows everything about us and has compassion for our weaknesses. As persons with Bipolar, God knows we have limitations, and knows our boundaries better than we do. God never expects us to go beyond what we are capable of doing.”
― Tony E Roberts, Delight in Disorder: Ministry, Madness, Mission

“All I know is that my life feels like a giant April Fool’s Joke most of the time. Either that or a mysterious box that has something different in it every time you open it.”
― David Estes, Burn

“I was my only obstacle. Once I stepped aside, there it was. Grace. Glaring at me, in the face, as certain as a Cove sunrise.”
― Jacqueline Cioffa, The Vast Landscape

“Be brave my child, be bold. You are meant for glorious things. God gave me the sea, sun, moon and stars when he let me borrow you. It’s all borrowed Addie, time that is. Sooner or later, we must pay it back.”
― Jacqueline Cioffa, The Vast Landscape

“She prays cruelty learns from compassion. She hopes time has made earth a softer, more malleable place to visit. Shame and fear obliterated, life colored with happy minutes.”
― Jacqueline Cioffa, The Vast Landscape

“So it began, the living escape. The writer’s life. Limits left at the door, with muddy boots, grace and undiscovered fantastical, far away lands. Intrigue exists, beyond the confines of four, suffocating walls. The flawed, vulnerable, messy, selfish heroine makes human mistakes, yet we forgive her. We recognize the broken pieces in ourselves, her honesty forces a hard look in the mirror. Characters become real, we picture them with our own eyes, hear their voices, empathize with their story. We root them on. When the writer does their job well, we love them, never wanting to say good-bye.”
― Jacqueline Cioffa, The Vast Landscape

“Some of us are born plain unlucky, helplessly watching others sail through. When tragedy strikes, those ‘lucky bastards’ won’t have a fucking clue what to do, paralyzed by fear.”
― Jacqueline Cioffa, The Vast Landscape

“He had proved himself to the other men by how well he did at training, how he scaled the obstacles and shimmied up the rough rope, but he had made no friend. He said very little. He did not want to know their stories. It was better to leave each man’s load unopened, undisturbed, in his own mind.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“What is perfect, really? The absence of perfection and the existence of human nature in place of something we want to do or we don’t want to do, is an excuse, not an exoneration.”
― Allie Burke, Paper Souls

“The universe requires balance. Nothing, nothing, can exist without it. There is no life, no light, without death, without darkness. There is no memory without emptiness.”
― Allie Burke, Paper Souls

“She was so good at pretending to be normal it disgusted her.”
― Allie Burke, Paper Souls

“But that was just Brendan and Emily. Two people who simultaneously loved one another too much and not enough. Insanity is defined by repeating the same act while expecting a different result. Schizophrenia made insanity easy on Emily, though. Love is like a shadow. You see it right in front of your eyes, but it isn’t really there. Is it?”
― Allie Burke, Paper Souls

“Sometimes stunned silence is better than applause.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“Normal is boring. Weird is better. Goats are awesome, but only in small quantities.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“When I look at my life I see high-water marks of happiness and I see the lower places where I had to convince myself that suicide wasn’t an answer. And in between I see my life. I see that the sadness and tragedy in my life made the euphoria and delicious ecstasy that much more sweet. I see that stretching out my soul to feel every inch of horrific depression gave me more room to grow and enjoy the beauty of life that others might not ever appreciate. I see that there is dust in the air that will eventually settle onto the floor to be swept out the door as a nuisance, but before that, for one brilliant moment I see the dust motes catch sunlight and sparkle and dance like stardust. I see the beginning and the end of all things. I see my life. It is beautifully ugly and tarnished in just the right way. It sparkles with debris. There is wonder and joy in the simplest of things.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“To all who walk the dark path, and to those who walk in the sunshine but hold out a hand in the darkness to travel beside us: Brighter days are coming. Clearer sight will arrive. And you will arrive too. No, it might not be forever. The bright moments might be for a few days at a time, but hold on for those days. Those days are worth the dark.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“You are alive. You have fought and battled them. You are scarred and worn and sometimes exhausted and were perhaps even close to giving up, but you did not.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“Ground zero is where the normal people live their lives, but not us. We live in the negatives so often that we begin to understand that life when the sun shines should be lived full throttle, soaring. The invisible tether that binds the normal people on their steady course doesn’t hold us in the same way. Sometimes we walk in sunlight with everyone else. Sometimes we live underwater and fight and grow. And sometimes …  … sometimes we fly.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“Where do I fit? Why am I here? Will I love, be loved? We are born with a fixed expiration date, yet we carry on, walking this earth the best we can until we’re pixie dust.”
― Jacqueline Cioffa, Georgia Pine

“We are born with a sole purpose. With unique gifts, I suppose. We must decide whether to use them, or discard them.”
― Jacqueline Cioffa, Georgia Pine

“PAIN, NOT UNLIKE CLAY, stretches and molds us into someone we never knew existed. There’s beauty in that. Beauty most people can’t, don’t want to, or are afraid to see. Every scar we carry, physical or emotional, is unique. Nobody’s pain feels exactly the same because I can’t experience what you have.”
― Rachel Thompson, Broken Places: A Memoir of Abuse

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“time is relative. It varies according to the rhythm of one’s heart.”
― Nicole Collet, RED: A Love Story

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I can feel history because, through those around me, I have felt the pain of the world, its hope, and its courage in the face of suffering and death. I cannot heal the world or erase its darkness, but maybe I can make it see, make it feel the realities it only thinks it understands. Knowing is not enough. Facts alone will never change us. The music of reality is where our salvation lies.”
― L.E. Henderson, Remembering The Future - Fantasy and Science Fiction Anthology: And Other Tales