Molly Cruz > Molly's Quotes

“Destiny will always make someone angry, but better that person be angry with you than for you to be angry with you. I guarantee you will end up an angry person the day you awaken spiritually and realize that you’ve adhered to everyone’s priorities except your own.”
― T.D. Jakes, Destiny: Step into Your Purpose

“Destiny is not for comfort seekers. Destiny is for the daring and determined who are willing to endure some discomfort, delay gratification, and go where Destiny leads.”
― T.D. Jakes, Destiny: Step into Your Purpose

“Share your dream with people who want you to succeed.”
― T.D. Jakes, Destiny: Step into Your Purpose

“When you live your own dream, you don’t have time to be a hater.”
― T.D. Jakes, Destiny: Step into Your Purpose

“You are closer to Destiny than ever, wiser than you have ever been, because you’ve learned from the ups and downs you have experienced. You are stronger than you’ve ever been because you have endured hardship, hurt, and betrayal of false friends, and are still standing. You are closer than ever because you’ve figured out who you are and who you are not. You know what you want and where you belong. You have let go of the people and the circumstances that have no role in your future. You’re closer than ever because you live in ever-growing awareness of what matters in your life and what does not. Smell and taste your destiny. You know you are close because you are striving. Soon the entire unfolded journey will make sense.”
― T.D. Jakes, Destiny: Step into Your Purpose

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It's those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn't change, but we do.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“The thing is we don't need to change our brains at all. Time does so much of the emptying for us.Live long enough and you'll forget almost everything you thought you'd always remember.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“...We humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like “will” and “choice,” and they end by saying, “Don’t you think there’s more to it than the brain?” They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they’re really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they’ve made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives.

I understand this impulse. I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself. I don’t want to be dismissed the way that Nana was once dismissed. I know that it’s easier to say Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs, easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure hat everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me, and when I do so, I give in to the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It’s just that I’m standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“But the memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“In just that short amount of time, Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all of our lives revolved. I didn’t want to stare directly at it.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Surely, there's strength in being dressed for a storm, even when there's no storm in sight?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“And though I hadn't worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion,her faith,they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever way she saw fit. Didn't she deserve at least that much? We have to go through this life somehow”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Being saved, I was taught when I was a child, was a way of saying, Sinner that I am, sinner that I will ever be, I relinquish control of my life to He who knows more than I, He who knows everything. It is not a magical moment of becoming sinless, blameless, but rather it’s a way of saying, Walk with me.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Nana is the reason I began this work, but not in a wholesome, made-for-TED Talk kind of way Instead, this science was a way for me to challenge myself, to do something truly hard, and in so doing to work through all of my misunderstandings about his addiction and all of my shame. Because I still have so much shame. I'm full to the brim with it; I'm spilling over. I can look at my data again and again. I can look at scan after scan of drug-addicted brains shot through with holes, Swiss-cheesed, atrophied, irreparable. I can watch that blue light flash through the brain of a mouse and note the behavioral changes that take place because of it, and know how many years of difficult, arduous science went into those tiny changes, and still, still, think, Why didn't Nana stop? Why didn't he get better for us? For me?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they're really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they've made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become—a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“What’s the point of all of this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Nothing teaches you the true nature of your friendships like a sudden death, worse still, a death that’s shrouded in shame.”
― Yaa gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“When it came to God, I could not give a straight answer. I had not been able to give a straight answer since the day Nana died. God failed me then, so utterly and completely that it had shaken my capacity to believe in him. And yet. How to explain every quiver? How to explain that once sure-footed knowledge of his presence in my heart?”
― Yaa gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“I know that psychology and neuroscience have to work in concert if we want to address the full range of human behavior, and I really do love the idea of the whole animal, but I guess my question is that if the brain can't account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for 'us' to feel and think, then what is 'us'? Do you believe in souls? I was breathless.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“The reverend's sermon that day was beautiful. She approached the Bible with extraordinary acuity, and her interpretation of it was so humane, so thoughtful, that I became ashamed of the fact that I very rarely associated those two things with religion. My entire life would have been different if I'd grown up in this woman's church instead of in a church that seemed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to undermine one's faith.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“we humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.”
― Yaa gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“When I was a child, no one ever said the words "institutionalized racism." We hardly even said the word "racism." I don't think I took a single class in college that talked about the physiological effects of years of personally medicated racism and internalized racism. This was before studies came out that showed that black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, before people were talking about epigenetics and whether or not trauma was heritable. If those studies were out there, I never read them. If those classes were offered, I never took them. There was little interest in these ideas back then because there was, there *is,* little interest in the lives of black people.

What I'm saying is I didn't grow up with a language for, a way to explain, to parse out, my self-loathing. I grew up only with my part, my little throbbing stone of self-hate that I carried around with me to church, to school, to all those places in my life that worked, it seemed to me then, to affirm the idea that I was irreparably, fatally, wrong. I was a child who liked to be right.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“One-tenth of a centimeter is all that stood between pretty good and unimaginable sorrow.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom