Quotes - Deb Benfield (Winston Salem, NC) Showing 1-30 of 184

#1

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

tags: gratitude, happiness

5515 likes

#2

“Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve,
I want to tie the two arms together,
And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.”
― Robert Bly, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars: Poems

399 likes

#3

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

tags: seasons, strength, trial, triumph

11212 likes

#4

“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

tags: happiness, hope, inspirational, new-year

4707 likes

#5

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”
― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

tags: story, writing

1766 likes

#6

“Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.”
― William Wordsworth, The Excursion 1814

845 likes

#7

“The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

1620 likes

#8

“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood: A Poignant Memoir About Parents and Passion in 1950s Pittsburgh

463 likes

#9

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

tags: courage, empowerment, self-determination, women

6529 likes

#10

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie Du Mariage: Ou Meditations De Philosophie Eclectique, Sur Le Bonheur Et Le Malheur Conjugal

tags: human-nature, love

2890 likes

#11

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

tags: life, poetry

1302 likes

#12

“Joy is the best makeup.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

1843 likes

#13

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

2242 likes

#14

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E. B. White

2265 likes

#15

“I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

2293 likes

#16

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

tags: love, poetry

16156 likes

#17

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
― William Ernest Henley, Echoes of Life and Death

tags: captain, fate, master

2291 likes

#18

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

tags: love

1429 likes

#19

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

tags: ecstasy, escape, freedom, intoxication, reality

2763 likes

#20

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

tags: echo, words

1149 likes

#21

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010]

tags: curiosity

1684 likes

#22

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

2629 likes

#23

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

tags: repression, strength

1667 likes

#24

“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

tags: inspirational, love

849 likes

#25

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

tags: better-life-empathy

18377 likes

#26

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

tags: freedom, self

3036 likes

#27

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
― Desmond Tutu

tags: goodness, incrementalism, kindness

3190 likes

#28

“Don't try to win over the haters; you are not a jackass whisperer.”
― Scott Stratten, UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.

739 likes

#29

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

tags: hope

4023 likes

#30

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections

tags: forgiveness, strength, weakness

10857 likes

Deb Benfield > Deb's Quotes

Tags From Deb’s Quotes