B.J. > B.J.'s Quotes

“Runners aren't impervious to pain, we're just better at choosing what kind of pain we have to feel.

And when I run, that's exactly what I'm doing.

I'm asserting control over the uncontrollable.

I'm housebreaking a tornado.”
― The Oatmeal, The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances (Volume 5)

“The quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise.”
― Gerald Lawson Sittser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss

“All the joy the world contains Has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.”
― Śāntideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

“If there is a remedy, then what is the use of frustration? If there is no remedy, then what is the use of frustration?”
― Śāntideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

“So take advantage of this human boat. Free yourself from sorrow’s mighty stream! This vessel will be later hard to find. The time that you have now, you fool, is not for sleep!”
― Śāntideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

“I did not become a runner to lose weight, I did it to escape my computer”
― The Oatmeal, The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances (Volume 5)

“So many problems are caused by unnecessary secrets.”
― Cassandra Clare, A Deeper Love

“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Around and around it went, and what was round had no point, any fool knew that.”
― Stephen King, The Institute

“.. .what is the mother of carelessness if not assumption?”
― Stephen King, The Institute

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there'll be another one coming along tomorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month. But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing”
― Jesse Livermore, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

“I quite cold-bloodedly reached the conclusion that I would never be able to accomplish anything useful so long as I was worried.”
― Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

“As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
― Franz Kafka

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook