Penny > Penny's Quotes

“Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape -- all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
― Pema Chödrön

“So at family gatherings… I try to stick to the acceptable script. Indeed, I discover that the less I say, the happier everyone seems to be with me. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off as a paraplegic or afflicted by some tragic form of cancer. The invisibility and periodicity of my disorder, along with how often I border on normalcy, allows them to evade my need for their understanding. And because our most enduring family heirloom is avoidance and denial of pain and suffering, I don’t need much prompting to shut myself down in their presence.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

“Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Anything you can aquire is only another thing you'll lose.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Some days heaven touches earth. And do we notice it at the time? Or do we know it later – when heaven is snatched away?”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“take it from me that a fragile mother is a scary thing for a child – it feels like your whole life is made of paper.)”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“We were both looking for something we couldn’t have again. The past.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“Do happy people have less need to remember the details of their life, I wondered.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“People don’t know things unless you tell them. This is an important point to remember.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“Sometimes you can't solve the problems you've helped to create.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“We all find different ways to cover up our pain. Most of them don’t work.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“Life stories are allowed to be selective.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“why were women made to feel bad for saying things that were reasonable?”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“way we catch each other’s feelings, that’s the joy and the agony of love.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“Maybe everyone makes a false narrative out of their life to some extent.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“It is, surprisingly, possible to feel deep joy inside deep sadness”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“Thank you for what? I’d never know. Lives stop with frayed ends. Dirty washing still in the laundry basket.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“None of us tell it exactly how it is …’ ‘We make it how we wish it was,”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“I guess there are moments when we’d all like to climb out of time,”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“If stars only came out once every thirty years, we'd be totally mesmerized by them, and we'd stay up all night lying on our backs looking at them. But because they're here forever we take them for granted.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“Life is never enough for us. That's the great tragedy of being human.”
― Joanna Glen, All My Mothers

“He would have loved me unquestioningly and stubbornly forever. And I don’t know if I want to be loved like that.”
― Dolly Alderton, Good Material

“I’ve been doing what the elephants do. I’ve been scattering the bones of us and who we were together. ... It’s a weird kind of mourning and a weird kind of celebration, to examine the skeleton of something that was once so magnificent, before you scatter all the fragments of it out into the world to say goodbye.”
― Dolly Alderton, Good Material

“You are locked in a prison of your own nostalgia. You need to let go of the past.”
― Dolly Alderton, Good Material

“I expect you’ve seen the footage: elephants, finding the bones of one of their own kind dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers and the sun, then untidily left there, decide to do something about it. But what, exactly? They can’t, of course, reassemble the old elephant magnificence; they can’t even make a tidier heap. But they can hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them this way and that way. So they do. And their scattering has an air of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary. Their great size, too, makes them the very embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks lends sprezzatura. Elephants puzzling out the anagram of their own anatomy, elephants at their abstracted lamentations – may their spirit guide me as I place my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements. – A Scattering, Christopher Reid”
― Dolly Alderton, Good Material