Debi Hawkes > Debi's Quotes

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“I am ashes where once I was fire...”
― Lord Byron, Selected Poems

“I wasn’t so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn’t so special.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs

“I wouldn't even consider it if I were you. But then if I were you, I would not be me, and if I were not me, I would not be able to advise you, and if I were unable to advise you, you'd do as you like, so you might as well do as you like and have done with it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“May God make safe to me each step, May God make open to me each pass, May God make clear to me each road, And may He take me in the clasp of His own two hands.”
― Diana Gabaldon, The Fiery Cross

“I remained a child, in need of someone to care for me. That person had been my mother all my life. I feared losing her. I feared not having her near me, not having her around, a part of my life,”
― Robert Dugoni, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.”
― Ray Bradbury

“No amount of medication or therapy would ever bring her back to the woman she’d once been.”
― Melinda Leigh, Say You're Sorry

“what if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again?”
― Tana French, The Witch Elm

“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. . . . A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. —JAMES AGEE, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”
― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound

“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Tell them to walk in the shade. To listen with their eyes, to see with their skin, and to feel with their ears, because life speaks to us all and we just need to know and wait to listen to it, see it, feel it.”
― Sofía Segovia, The Murmur of Bees

“Is what I’m saying true? Is it necessary? Will it honor God?”
― Max Lucado, James

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’ —Charles Spurgeon”
― John Marrs, What Lies Between Us