Twila > Twila's Quotes

“A SECRET’S WORTH DEPENDS ON THE PEOPLE FROM WHOM IT MUST be kept.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“don’t need to know you to love you.”
― Cleo Wade, Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life

“Comparison and extreme competition run on insecurities and the belief in scarcity, which inevitably isolates us from one another.”
― Cleo Wade, Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life

“Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, re-evaluate and criticise.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“I can't change where I come from or what I've been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“A dictionary is a repository of human wisdom not because it contains an accumulation of words but because it embodies true hope, wrought over time by indomitable spirits.”
― Shion Miura, The Great Passage

“Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means that I am failing in another area of my life.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

“Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.”
― Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“There’s something about living in a different place that allows you to be whoever you want to be.”
― Josie Silver, One Day in December

“creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that—merely by being here—you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“Giving ourselves permission allows us to hack rules that don’t make sense rather than follow them; to take ideas and stories apart that aren’t working; to go around the gatekeepers, bullies, and bureaucratic bottlenecks that would stifle change. Developing a habit of self-permission will instill in you the belief that you are in control of your career and your life, regardless of what is going on around you.”
― Beth Comstock, Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change

“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“What matters to you the most, and why does it matter? What rights are you worried about losing, or whose lives do you fear for? Tell their stories.”
― Tim Federle, How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation

“When we give time to a quieting experience, we have a different life because we have a different nervous system.”
― Gabrielle Bernstein, The Universe Has Your Back: Transform Fear to Faith

“It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,” said the leadership expert, who had surveyed one thousand people to come to this conclusion. “The main barrier is not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception of what is a real requirement or rule, of how processes like these truly work, and this is especially a problem for women.”
― Alexandra Chang, Days of Distraction

“Equanimity is based on the knowledge that everything changes and will always change and that is okay. We find equanimity only by paying close attention to what is happening in the moment.”
― Susan Juby, Mindful of Murder

“An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Your mind will rejoin your body when it is safe to do so.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“Sometimes,’ she said, ‘at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“She gives a little shake of her shoulders. “No one wants to see it.” “What I don’t understand is why a man’d think you would?” Cricket takes a sip of tea. “Well, I suppose it’s a bit like when I had my cat. Tibby would bring dead things in for me. He’d proudly leave them on the mat for me to find of a morning. I know the intention was to show off and please me, but it was quite revolting.” I can’t help but laugh. “I’m not sure he’d like being compared to a dead mouse.” “No, I expect not.” She smiles. “But it does look rather like one, doesn’t it?”
― Alexandra Potter, Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up

“I’ve found friends and acquaintances keep their distance because they don’t want to upset you or say the wrong thing. What they don’t realize is you’re already upset beyond anything they could ever say or do. It’s their silence that upsets you. You feel isolated. Abandoned.”
― Alexandra Potter, Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up

“You’re tougher than you think. You’ll get through this and be better for it.” And she will. I know for a fact that when your heart gets ripped out, it’ll reassemble into something stronger. More durable.”
― Julie Clark, The Lies I Tell

“Do something you love. Keep it simple. It irked Max, because he would not be happy doing something simple. His desires were complex. His ambitions were complex.”
― David Yoon, Version Zero

“There are certain male figures we were just told to believe in, to trust. Our rock gods. Our politicians. Our medical professionals. A cornerstone of reaching adult womanhood is realizing that this is a myth—that men, no matter what their profession or how deeply their work speaks to you, can be dangerous.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes

“A healthy amount of stress is important because it’s an adaptive response to life’s many demands. It serves a functional purpose to move your life forward, but only when it’s dialed to the right frequency for you. The key is to figure out just how much stress is too much stress for you.”
― Aditi Nerurkar, The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience

“Authoritarian, high-control religion doesn’t allow for both/ and. Everything is either/or. Same thing with high-control politics. Having health and balance, then, means being able to hold both. And to do that, one has to be open, willing, curious, kind.”
― Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe