Marcia > Marcia's Quotes

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”
― Michael Crichton

“Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA.
How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive.
Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.
...
I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline.
The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts.”
― Michael Prager, Fat Boy Thin Man

“An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage

“Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.”
― Paul Terry

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“Having an intense desire to speak up for yourself. Becoming angry with how much you’ve let yourself be walked on or how much you’ve let other people’s voices get into your head is a sign that you’re finally ready to stop listening and love yourself by respecting yourself first.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“My mom’s favorite joke is about a spider and a centipede having tea. The centipede gets up and offers to go buy snacks. He goes out the door and hours pass. The spider is so hungry, wondering what happened, and opens the door, only to find the centipede sitting on the doormat, still putting on his shoes. I imagine myself the centipede, struggling to tie each of my hundred tiny shoes, it takes me longer to get going than most. But I will put on shoe after shoe after shoe until I can get up and go again.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir

“She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven't met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you.”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“People were strange like that. They could be completely uninterested in you, but the moment you picked up a book, you were the one being rude.”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“Reason and law don’t mean much when white folk want their way.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout

“To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

“Sometimes something comes along and tears your roots right out the ground, and that’s when you know you been planted too long.”
― Sheri Reynolds, A Gracious Plenty

“When you let your mind go blank,' he said, 'or when you stop talking for a long time, something happens. Time becomes different. It goes away. It doesn't come back until you start to say something.”
― Peter Høeg, Borderliners