Deedee > Deedee's Quotes

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
― William Blake

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
― Émile Zola

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”
― Georgia O'Keefe

“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Selected Works: The Custom-House, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun

“Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it”
― James Baldwin

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Shut your eyes and see.”
― James Joyce

“If you even dream of beating me, you'd better wake up and apologize.”
― Muhammad Ali

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl

“If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”
― Muhammad Ali

“I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong...No VietCong Ever Called Me Nigger.”
― Muhammad Ali

“To think of the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), the rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city.

Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can't shake the sense that they're too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard...and a beauty that I can't help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife

“All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once as soft as water. And that's the tragedy of living.”
― pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You

“Sunshine all the time makes a desert.”
― Arab proverb

“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
― Stephen Bantu Biko, Black Consciousness in South Africa

“I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.”
― Charles Bukowski

“There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming.”
― Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way

“I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”
― Toni Morrison

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou