Alaska > Alaska's Quotes

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“A highly developed values system is like a compass. It serves as a guide to point you in the right direction when you are lost.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
― Rita Mae Brown, Alma Mater

“It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae

“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
― Gloria Steinem

“Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?”
― Peter Hitchens

“The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.”
― Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

“In a dependent relationship, the protégé can always control the protector by threatening to collapse.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March Of Folly: From Troy To Vietnam

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“Letting yourself be vulnerable isn't always a weakness. Sometimes it can be a conscious decision to draw the other person out.”
― Penelope Douglas, Bully

“Too many people are buying things they can't afford, with money that they don't have... to impress people that they don't like!"

Nothing to do w/ "books" -- Just like the quote!”
― Will Smith

“A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“When you repay evil with evil, you become evil.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.”
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'

If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“One of the greatest evils is the foolishness of a good man. For the giving man to withhold helping someone in order to first assure personal fortification is not selfish, but to elude needless self-destruction; martyrdom is only practical when the thought is to die, else a good man faces the consequence of digging a hole from which he cannot escape, and truly helps no one in the long run.”
― Mike Norton, Just Another War Story

“When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't...”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue. ”
― Jennifer Salaiz

“Closing The Cycle

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters - whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden?

You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened. You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister, everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when we try to understand the things that happen to us. What has passed will not return: we cannot for ever be children, late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents, lovers who day and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least intention of coming back.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away. That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home. Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts - and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.

Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them. Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood. Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.

Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the "ideal moment." Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back. Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person - nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need. This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.

Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust. Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.”
― Paulo Coelho

“When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.”
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“I wish I could draw you how I see you. I'd draw a boy with the most magnetic smile, and the kindest hands, and eyes that are gloomy, but can sometimes be bright. I'd draw a boy who deserves to see the ocean.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“Everyone who has ever built anywhere a new heaven first found the power thereto in his own hell.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche