Vin > Vin's Quotes

“You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love? You are just naked. You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe that the other person loves you back...”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."

So God just leaves?"

No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."

Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it."

But the sparrow still falls.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“I would say about individuals, A Individual dies when they cease to to be surprised. I am surprised every morning when I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil I don't accomodate, I don't accomodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere. I am still so surprised! That is why I am against it. We must learn to be surprised.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel

“The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“You see, that is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, then the rest of it was God's will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn't it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances," he continued with academic exactitude, each word etched on the air with acid, "is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“See that's where it falls apart for me!" Anne cried. "What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can't swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God's in charge or he's not...”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets

“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel

“I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Don't worry, God understands,' Mom said. 'He knows that your father is a cross we must bear.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational.There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me. ”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not as long as there are plums to eat and somebody--anybody--who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens on pinches, only rolling abundance. That's how you acquire the resolution for survival that the upcoming years are about to demand. You don't give it. You earn it.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.”
― Mary Karr

“Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“The Lesson You've Got

to learn is the someday you'll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they've shaped.

Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There's grief enough
for each. My mother

learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth's
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.

Other than myself, of course.
I've made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note

those faces passing by: Not one's a god. ”
― Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome

“Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.”
― Mary Karr, Now Go Out There

“None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.

Where else do we ever have to go, and why?”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, You & Yours

“I realized that I travel too much on the day I began tidying an airport as if it were my bedroom.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, You and Yours

“Freedom will feel good to you too. Please acknowledge our higher purpose.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, You and Yours