Rachel Townzen > Rachel's Quotes

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.”
― Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

“Some things don't last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down on the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there.”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

“She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. It just doesn’t catch up, it overtakes … blotting out the future.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

“may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile”
― E.E. Cummings, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

“Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that's what makes you strong.”
― Sarah Dessen

“I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

“You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it. ”
― Mary Oliver

“We can't expect everybody to be there for us, all at once. So it's a lucky thing that really, all you need is someone. ”
― Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key

“Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”
― Mary Oliver

“Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense. ”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I don't believe in failure, because simply by saying you've failed, you've admitted you attempted. And anyone who attempts is not a failure. Those who truly fail in my eyes are the ones who never try at all. The ones who sit on the couch and whine and moan and wait for the world to change for them.”
― Sarah Dessen, Keeping the Moon

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
― Michel Foucault

“There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don't have the strength.”
― Teddy Roosevelt

“There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.”
― George R.R. Martin

“You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia