Alison > Alison's Quotes

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
― Anais Nin

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“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

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
― Henry Miller

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”
― John Lennon

“Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.”
― Rob Bignell, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers

“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.

Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it's not -- it's luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”
― Gloria Steinem

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?”
― Margaret Mead

“Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
― Don Marquis

“I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them.”
― Uma Thurman

“Don't die with your music still in you.”
― Wayne W. Dyer

“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”
― Wayne W. Dyer

“When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.”
― Wayne W. Dyer

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.”
― John Wayne

“All battles are fought by scared men who'd rather be some place else.”
― John Wayne

“Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the hour
and the bell; grand me, in your mercy,
a little more time. love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart. Who knows what
will finally happen or where I will be sent,
yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
except the prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowly learning.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“Oversharing? Not vulnerability; I call it floodlighting. ... A lot of times we share too much information as a way to protect us from vulnerability, and here's why.

I'm scared to let you know that I just wrote this article and I'm under total fire for it and people are making fun of me and I'm feeling hurt -- the same thing that I told someone in an intimate conversation. So what I do is I floodlight you with it - I don't know you very well or I'm in front of a big group, or it's a story that I haven't processed enough to be sharing with other people - and you immediately respond "hands up; push me away" and I go, "See? No one cares about me. No one gives a s*** that I'm hurting. I knew it."

It's how we protect ourselves from vulnerability. We just engage in a behavior that confirms our fear.”
― Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“And the best preparation for writing any story is to know with clarity what your protagonists’ worldview is, and more to the point, where and why it’s off base. Thus you have a clear view of the world as your protagonist sees it and insight into how she therefore interprets, and reacts to, everything that happens to her. It’s what allows you to construct a plot that forces her to reevaluate what she was so damn sure was true when the story began. That is what your story is really about, and what readers stay up long past their bedtime to find out.”
― Lisa Cron, Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence