Alex Linschoten > Alex's Quotes

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don't do them and see what happens.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“You know what I like most about people? Pets.
”
― Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

“The statement 'the Shariah says...' is thus automatically misleading, as there is almost always more than one answer to any legal question.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“I had not lived a sheltered life. I’d had my share of hardships and sorrows. I thought I knew how the world worked, but this I could not believe. I thought that if it was known that bad things were happening to children, those bad things would be stopped. But that is not the sort of society we live in, I realized. There is no such society.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“Most people think they know pain. Everyone's done something: broken a limb, been stung by a wasp, recovered from an operation or rammed a baby through their birth canal. But chronic pain is different. It isn't just pain that lingers; it's pain that dominates. It swaddles you in its gloom and slips blinkers on you until everything you see, and everything you experience, is filtered through that pea soup of pain.

The vast majority of chronic pain conditions are not only incurable but also untreatable. They don't respond to drugs, and science hasn't -- yet -- located a central fuse box to repair. So people with chronic pain not only live with pain; they're told that this is it until death they do part. It is a diagnosis that dehumanises your body as much as it eviscerates your spirit. And it's made worse because, if there's no obvious physical explanation for it -- as is the case with most types of chronic pain (diseases like arthritis aside) -- people think, consciously or not, that you're making it up.

Three GPs, eight consultants, three physiotherapists, one nurse and two psychologists had tried to rout my pain in the first year of its existence. All had failed, though each had laid their failure at my door, not theirs. There's no physical reason for it, they said; or there's kind of a physical reason but not enough of a physical reason to correspond to your level of pain. Maybe, some of them ventured, possibly, do you think... could it be in your head?”
― Julia Buckley, Heal Me: In Search of a Cure