Kaisha > Kaisha's Quotes

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“There is too little mystery in the world; too many people say exactly what they feel or want.”
― Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

“As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

“People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.”
― Pema Chodron

“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
― Pema Chödrön

“Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape -- all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know
…nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. it just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Pastries”! We shall have people talking of “grouses” next, and “deers” and “snipes”.”
― E. Nesbit, The Lark

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.”
― Jilly Cooper

“Sociologists also say that higher education and training in the scientific method generally make people less gullible. And for better or for worse, so does being in a bad mood. In several experiments, researchers found that when someone is in a good mood, they become more innocent and unsuspecting, while feeling grumpy makes one better at sensing deception. Which has to be the most curmudgeonly superpower I’ve ever heard.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism—Understanding the Social Science of Cult Influence

“dispense love and not rules”
― Leon Uris, Exodus

“Mama read David Copperfield again. She had become one of those characters in the novels that she loved, the people who read Dickens in the jungle over and over. Why? Because when Dickens is better than your life, then why live your life? It would be foolishness not to read Dickens instead.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“The love is in the sauce,” which had always irritated Sunny. He wanted only sauce in his sauce.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Mama got up, went into her bedroom, and shut the door. A woman must stay alone for a long while until the hate men have for women has left her, and even longer until the jealousy women have for other women has left her, and longer still until the anger her children have for her has left her—until she is no longer a woman altered by the resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be, but empty as a skull or a shell, filled only by whatever she pleases, forest air perhaps.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“What I love most are cozy stories of women living peacefully by themselves. Small, simple things: a toothache, a boiled egg, a neighborhood quarrel, a lost cat that you find in the end, before it grows skinny.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny