Ani > Ani's Quotes

“It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.”
― John O'Donohue

“Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.”
― Jodi Picoult, Leaving Time

“When all was said and done, it was conceivable that a being's purpose remained the same throughout his life, and Eddie's purpose was exactly what it had been when he was a boy, to pursue the light and find what was lost."
Page 87”
― Alice Hoffman , The Museum of Extraordinary Things

“Imagine two astronauts go to the moon, and while they’re there, there’s an accident and their ship can’t take them back to Earth. They have only enough oxygen for two days. There is no hope of someone coming from Earth in time to rescue them. They have only two days to live. If you were to ask them at that moment, “What is your deepest wish?” they would answer, “To be back home walking on our beautiful planet Earth.” That would be enough for them; they wouldn’t want anything else. They wouldn’t think of being the head of a large corporation, a famous celebrity, or the president of the United States. They wouldn’t want anything but to be back here—walking on Earth, enjoying every step, listening to the sounds of nature, or holding the hand of their beloved while contemplating the moon at night. We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from dying on the moon. We are on Earth now, and we need to enjoy walking on this precious, beautiful planet. Zen Master Linji said, “The miracle is not to walk on water or fire. The miracle is to walk on the earth.” I cherish that teaching. I enjoy just walking, even in busy places like airports and railway stations. Walking like that, with each step caressing our Mother Earth, we can inspire other people to do the same. We can enjoy every minute of our lives.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm

“The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.”
― Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World

“The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory.”
― Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile

“If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. —FREDERICK BUECHNER”
― Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

“There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread.”
― Noah Lukeman, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation

“Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving.”
― anthony marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“I think about all the ways I’ve been perceived by others over the years: as a burden, a dutiful daughter, a girlfriend, a spiteful wretch, an invalid…
This is my letter to the World that never wrote to Me.
“You showed what no one else could see,” I tell him.
He squeezes my shoulder. Both of us are silent, looking at the painting.
There she is, that girl, on a planet of grass. Her wants are simple: to tilt her face to the sun and feel its warmth. To clutch the earth beneath her fingers. To escape from and return to the house she was born in.
To see her life from a distance, as clear as a photograph, as mysterious as a fairy tale.
This is a girl who has lived through broken dreams and promises. Still lives. Will always live on that hillside, at the center of a world that unfolds all the way to the edges of the canvas. Her people are witches and persecutors, adventures and homebodies, dreamers and pragmatists. Her world is both circumscribed and boundless, a place where the stranger at the door may hold a key to the rest of her life.
What she most wants—what she most truly yearns for—is what any of us want: to be seen.
And look. She is.”
― Christina Baker Kline

“We as women have so much cultural training (on top of whatever familial nurturing history we have) that pushes us to give nurture to everyone but our selves and to look for nurture from anyone but our selves. Practicing and developing our capacity to nurture our selves whenever we need nurturing is vital to our process of becoming more whole. Nurture from others can add on to and amplify what we do for our selves. But to take the very best care of our selves, self-nurturing is the essential baseline from which we must start. As”
― Robyn L. Posin, Go Only As Fast As Your Slowest Part Feels Safe To Go

“Because their shame is so much deeper and more agonizing, Extreme Narcissists will stop at nothing to avoid feeling it. In fact, almost everything they say and do is intended to avoid the experience of shame. The narcissistic defenses they mobilize against shame are so extreme and pervasive that they color everything about the person’s personality, relationships, and behavior, creating a kind of shell or armor against the threat of shame.”
― Joseph Burgo, The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age

“As St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught, whatever we say about God is more unlike God than saying nothing. If we do say something, it can only be a pointer toward the Mystery that can never be articulated in words. All that words can do is point in the direction of the Mystery.”
― Thomas Keating, On Prayer

“To live in the presence of God on a continuous basis can become a kind of fourth dimension to our three-dimensional world, forming an invisible but real background to everything that we do or that happens in our lives.”
― Thomas Keating, On Prayer

“The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.”
― Arundhati Roy

“It was as if we’d been caught in a surreal photograph—the two of them looked so out of place there, in a room dedicated to superficialities. And yet it occurred to me that, in a way similar to what had been done to the people on the walls, we’d overlaid the humanity of the holy ones with a garment of fame. We looked at each of them and saw something more than a human being: a reflection of our own potential for greatness, maybe, spiritual greatness. We made them larger than life in order to remind ourselves that some part of us existed beyond the petty meanness of the ordinary day.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Being a priest is not easy in Rwanda now; people see my collar and scream, ‘Where was God when my family was being killed?! Where was Jesus when my child was being raped?! Why did God abandon Rwanda?!’” “I’ve heard people say that, too, Father.” “God didn’t abandon our country, Immaculée. He was here the entire time, feeling the pain of every victim. He is still here—He is with the wounded, the lost, and the grieving. Yes, it’s ugly in Rwanda, but God’s beauty is still alive here. And you will find it in love.”
― Immaculée Ilibagiza, Led by Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide

“We are at a time when old systems and ideas are being questioned and falling apart, and there is a great opportunity for something fresh to emerge. I have no idea what that will look like and no preconceptions about how things should turn out, but I do have a strong sense that the time we live in is a fertile ground for training in being open-minded and open-hearted. If we can learn to hold this falling apart–ness without polarizing and without becoming fundamentalist, then whatever we do today will have a positive effect on the future. Working with polarization and dehumanization won’t put an immediate end to the ignorance, violence, and hatred that plague this world. But every time we catch ourselves polarizing with our thoughts, words, or actions, and every time we do something to close that gap, we’re injecting a little bodhichitta into our usual patterns. We’re deepening our appreciation for our interconnectedness with all others. We’re empowering healing, rather than standing in its way. And because of this interconnectedness, when we change our own patterns, we help change the patterns of our culture as a whole.”
― Pema Chödrön, Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World

“Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy—pure, creative energy. There is an underlying, indwelling creative force infusing all of life—including ourselves. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good, orderly direction. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.”
― Julia Cameron, It's Never Too Late to Begin Again

“Upstream One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people—a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom, hello Andy. Hello Archibald Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lilian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. And in reply its thousands of leaves tremble! What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the middle of the night and
sing?”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect. _______”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“So, the first question we must ask ourselves is, what is a boggart?” Hermione put up her hand. “It’s a shape-shifter,” she said. “It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most.” “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Professor Lupin, and Hermione glowed. “So the boggart sitting in the darkness within has not yet assumed a form. He does not yet know what will frighten the person on the other side of the door. Nobody knows what a boggart looks like when he is alone, but when I let him out, he will immediately become whatever each of us most fears. “This means,” said Professor Lupin, choosing to ignore Neville’s small sputter of terror, “that we have a huge advantage over the boggart before we begin. Have you spotted it, Harry?” Trying to answer a question with Hermione next to him, bobbing up and down on the balls of her feet with her hand in the air, was very off-putting, but Harry had a go. “Er — because there are so many of us, it won’t know what shape it should be?” “Precisely,” said Professor Lupin, and Hermione put her hand down, looking a little disappointed. “It’s always best to have company when you’re dealing with a boggart. He becomes confused. Which should he become, a headless corpse or a flesh-eating slug? I once saw a boggart make that very mistake — tried to frighten two people at once and turned himself into half a slug. Not remotely frightening. “The charm that repels a boggart is simple, yet it requires force of mind. You see, the thing that really finishes a boggart is laughter. What you need to do is force it to assume a shape that you find amusing.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“But even when habits of blaming or defensiveness arise, something profound can change if those involved bring a committed presence to what is happening. This is when community becomes a refuge—a place of true awakening.”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“JOURNAL: What would I do if I had nothing to prove to anyone, including myself? What would I do if I knew there was no such thing as failure? What’s my dream? How can I take a leap of faith? What might that look like?”
― Bella Mahaya Carter, Where Do You Hang Your Hammock?: Finding Peace of Mind While You Write, Publish, and Promote Your Book

“When we know we are energy beings, we begin to live away from the fear-based stories our minds create and start living from the other option that is available to us—the perspective of our true, eternal nature as the Soulful Self. Rather than focusing externally, always scanning the horizon for what may do us harm, we focus inward on the energy within and around our body and rely on it to show us what is true for us. When we do this, life flows effortlessly. Opportunities for love and expansion are revealed naturally; we only have to lean in, say yes, and let them unfold. We are powerfully loving, and lovingly powerful. We know and feel our oneness with everything and feel separate from nothing. Stress and worry don’t exist, because we know, unequivocally, that everything in our life ultimately serves our expansion and well-being.”
― Sue Morter, The Energy Codes: The 7-Step System to Awaken Your Spirit, Heal Your Body, and Live Your Best Life

“Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love! We must find the way, you and I, no matter how long it takes.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“There is a particular kind of science that exists on these sorts of estates—the science of coaxing out bloodstains. For centuries it has been taught to future wives and mothers. If a university for women ever came about, it would be the most important subject. Childbirth, menstruation, war, fights, forays, pogroms, raids—all of it sheds blood, ever at the ready just beneath the skin. What to do with that internal substance that has the gall to make its way out, what kind of lye to wash it out, what vinegar to rinse it with? Perhaps try dampening a rag with a couple of tears and then rubbing carefully. Or soak in saliva. It befalls sheets and bedclothes, underwear, petticoats, shirts, aprons, bonnets and kerchiefs, lace cuffs and frills, corsets, and sukmanas. Carpets, floorboards, bandages, and uniforms.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob