Frances Caballo > Frances's Quotes

“I know logically that I can live without him, but loving him has become such an integral, necessary part of my life; I am not sure I could stop, even if we parted.”
― Anna Bayes, Under His Wings

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.”
― Albert Einstein

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
― Robert Frost, Collected Poems of Robert Frost

“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”
― W.E.B. DuBois

“focus on producing quality content, writing short posts (80 to 190 characters), and always including stupendous photographs that are colorful, unique, and compelling.”
― Frances Caballo, Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books

“post real information. Perhaps you’ll mention the literati you met at Book Expo America, the latest insight you gleaned from Bob Mayer’s blog Write It Forward, the book festival where you’ll be a presenter, or a courageous new book a colleague is publishing. The news can’t always be about you, right? But your posts can and should be informative and interesting, like the first paragraph of a Wall Street Journal article.”
― Frances Caballo, Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books

“Facebook is popular, approachable, and a fast, easy read. This social media behemoth is all about plot.”
― Frances Caballo, Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books

“His large ears
Hear everything
A hermit wakes
And sleeps in a hut
Underneath
His gaunt cheeks.
His eyes blue, alert,
Disappointed,
And suspicious,
Complain I
Do not bring him
The same sort of
Jokes the nurses
Do. He is a bird
Waiting to be fed,—
Mostly beak— an eagle
Or a vulture, or
The Pharoah's servant
Just before death.
My arm on the bedrail
Rests there, relaxed,
With new love. All
I know of the Troubadours
I bring to this bed.
I do not want
Or need to be shamed
By him any longer.
The general of shame
Has discharged
Him, and left him
In this small provincial
Egyptian town.
If I do not wish
To shame him, then
Why not love him?
His long hands,
Large, veined,
Capable, can still
Retain hold of what
He wanted. But
Is that what he
Desireed? Some
Powerful engine
Of desire goes on
Turning inside his body.
He never phrased
What he desired,
And I am

his son.”
― Robert Bly, Selected Poems

“Family meetings are a procedure,” a prominent palliative care physician named Susan Block had once said, “and they require no less skill than performing an operation.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“You imagine that each of them wears a necklace of intricate, intersecting circles of loss, grief, anger, fear, sadness, regret. You visualize this necklace hanging at their throats, golden and glistening under the hospital’s fluorescent lights, in the moments when their expressions of emotion make you want to leave the room. This is a necklace that you choose to wear, too.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“There is no script, no training course, that can teach you how to sit in silence, how to listen to them. You either have a deep well of your own suffering—your own intersecting, interlocked circles of loss, grief, anger, fear, sadness, regret—to draw upon, or you have a well of suffering that you have not recognized or are not ready to draw upon. We all have our suffering.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“You want to tell them that their bodies will die, but they won’t. That it is their bodies, not their spirits, that are finite, mortal. You want to tell them that you have had patients who have had near-death experiences, who have hovered above their bodies as medical teams performed CPR and experienced the purest joy and freedom they have ever known.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“You want to tell them that these people described freedom from their diseased bodies as being enveloped in pure, divine love, finally free of suffering. We never wanted to return to our earthly bodies, they tell you later.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“God’s purpose is not to erase human suffering, but instead to teach you how to overcome whatever life might bring.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Acceptance is a small, quiet room, Cheryl Strayed wrote”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Were we so blinded by the shiny allure and promise of technology and scientific innovation that we’d convinced ourselves we could defy nature, overlook the common human experience of death and suffering? Were we so focused on learning facts and procedures that we’d forgotten to consider medicine’s limits?”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“God’s call. A tiny phrase I had never heard in a medical conversation. Two words that said something enormous, eternal: dying is spiritual, not just medical. The moment of death can be sacred.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Maybe it meant surrendering the complete control we assume we have over our lives, and instead opening to the idea that another force, benevolent and mysterious, looked after us. Maybe it meant practicing acceptance of whatever life brings our way. And maybe it also meant remembering that our sorrows and joys, just like our bodies, were temporary”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“I’d learned was that living required both humility and acceptance of the unexpected.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“The soul wears the body like a cloth and discards it at the time of death.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
― 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. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. At one point, Frankl writes that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.” He concedes that only a few prisoners of the Nazis were able to do the former, “but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.” Finally, Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning