cl > cl's Quotes

“It's hard to describe, but I imagine the way I am at this moment is a lot like getting sucked into a vortex. Everything dark and churning, but slow churning instead of fast, and this great weight pulling you down, like it's attached to your feet even if you can't see it. I think, This is what it must be feel like to be trapped in quicksand.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The thing I realize is, that it's not what you take, it's what you leave.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“You have been in every way all that anyone could be.… If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257-foot bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I know life well enough to know you can’t count on things staying around or standing still, no matter how much you want them to. You can’t stop people from dying. You can’t stop them from going away. You can’t stop yourself from going away either. I know myself well enough to know that no one else can keep you awake or keep you from sleeping.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The problem with people is they forget that most of the time it's the small things that count.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“You make me lovely, and it’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love.…”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I do my best thinking at night when everyone else is sleeping. No interruptions. No noise. I like the feeling of being awake when no one else is.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“We are all alone, trapped in these bodies and our own minds, and whatever company we have in this life is only fleeting and superficial.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I am on the highest branch.
We are written in paint.
I believe in signs.
The glow of Ultraviolet.
A lake. A prayer. It's so lovely to be lovely in Private.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Sorry wastes time. You have to live your life like you'll never be sorry. It's easier just to do the right thing from the start so there's nothing to apologize for.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Because it's not a lie if it's how you feel.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“And in that moment there’s nothing I fear except losing hold of her hand.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I was here. TF.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The future is uncertain, but that can be a good thing.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. —Ernest Hemingway”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet