The Color of Everything Quotes

“If someone thinks you’re a fucking problem, an addict, a fuck-up, and broken, they’re going to treat you differently despite all their best intentions otherwise, which can foster a slow, steady reduction, stripping away confidence
and self-love until it all becomes a repeated, entrenched story. The irony is that this contraction often occurs in the care of those
who are genuinely trying to help.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Some new research tells us that imagining a feeling of happiness, especially during meditation, starts to shape our lives toward it despite no external factors changing at all. The pretty people in Venice, California, call this “manifestation,” but ironically, it usually isn’t about genuine contentment with what is but rather is focused on what we want. The Buddhists, Taoists, and Stoics have been quietly asserting for a couple of thousand years that lasting happiness is about presence as much as it is about where you end up.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“It’s a worn-out cliché that the first step is admitting you have a problem, and it’s true for most that in order to break an addiction you must see the problem clearly. You have to see the mountain that needs to be climbed. Tragically, for many it’s seemingly unclimbable. Admitting you have a problem means nothing but compounding shame and guilt unless you’re willing to climb. It will be steep and hard and exhausting and you’ll likely fall and end up in a heap. Maybe you’ll get hit by an avalanche.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows. —Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Maybe my art comes from the confusion that something as beautiful as life can hurt so much one day and fill me with joy the next. Maybe the bipolar temperament’s ability to touch those extremes is where the link lies, outside of science and explanation.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Reality is just a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs. —Robin Williams”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“For me, the accomplishment and celebration seem to be centered around something else. Suddenly my weaknesses are being celebrated as my strengths and I wonder if Achilles might have lived forever if he’d taken more care of his heel.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“All words are borrowed. The beauty of writing is how they flow through us and arrange themselves as something new but familiar. We can be unique and belong at the same time. In moments of confusion, anger, and sadness, words lend comfort, letting us know that someone else has navigated the same tempestuous tides and survived.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“In the bible, everyone comes from a fucked up family.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Only the summit can illuminate its own insignificance.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Psychology is an invitation out of victimhood, not into it.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Blame is useless amidst madness.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“We don’t need a reason to fight because the fight itself has become the reason. In that way, getting the shit kicked out of me is just another means to feel cared for. The fight is the shortcut to the attention we crave as we seesaw back and forth between violence and victim, using both sides to claw for love. How it got this way is anyone’s guess. Blame is useless amidst madness. But it’s clear to me that I co-author this chaos.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“If everything is the same thing, then does anything matter?” I insist. He caps his pen, pauses, and finally says, “Well, I suppose it’s the way it’s all arranged that gives it meaning . . . it’s how it’s put together. But then again, in the grand scheme of things . . . no, it probably doesn’t matter in the way we think it does.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“History is full of fraternal chaos: Romulus and Remus, Thor and Loki, Cain and Abel. It’s as if brothers are mythologically destined to clash.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“That my life can look so perfect from the exterior and feel so chaotic within seeds a deep sense of guilt, as though by living at all, I’m doing something wrong.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Downstream is the future, and if we choose honesty, the future is always hopeful. We’re never outside the reach of rebuilding and forgiving the mistakes we’ve made upstream. It’s frightening work but worth every mile we travel. With enough time and courage, the mistakes of our past become the unshakable bedrock of a better future.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“the brain doesn’t distinguish between an explosion on the battlefield and rape and getting T-boned on your way to work and an avalanche. Culture validates trauma based on its source and we pass judgment on what matters and what doesn’t. But PTSD is an unconscious response and the brain is indiscriminate. It doesn’t care about the story of how it happened. No one’s PTSD is more valid than another’s. Trauma wears many masks, but to the brain and body it’s faceless.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Depression erases the memory of not being depressed.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Mom is polite and well mannered because she comes from Minnesota, where they value tablecloths and porcelain.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“The majority of abuse resulting from patriarchal culture is perpetrated by men against women. In other ways, patriarchy harms men in astonishing numbers as well. It starts young as we’re taught that boys are strong. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t express except through competition and channeled aggression. Good boys become strong leaders by repressing emotion under a façade of false stoicism. By initiating boys into antiquated gender roles, we’re asked to divorce ourselves from our fullest emotional expression because that kind of vulnerability isn’t “strong” or “safe.” In doing so, our emotional development is stunted and our long-term capacity for connection and intimacy along with it. In time, boys become men who have bottled up a lifetime of pain until eventually we boil over. In this system, anger becomes the primary male emotion, which pushes away the very connection we long for. When anger abounds, love is eroded by fear.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“This equation isn’t mathematical. The sum of everything is infinity and the sum of infinity is 1—or maybe oneness. It’s an unending loop and only one thing seems to give it any meaning at all. After a long silence he says, “I love you so much.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“The world appears with too much contrast, like light is pressing itself against the seams of everything. Mud cliffs rise above and watch as indifferent sentinels. They’ve witnessed a thousand sky burials. The caves that brought me here ten years ago serve as perches for the vultures to collect before they descend on the body to feast and I see that everything has a role in the process.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“On a maze of walls hang lithographs, woodblocks, sketches, and tessellations of impossible symmetry. Dad isn’t a connoisseur of modern art but he can’t resist the mathematical genius of M. C. Escher. The tessellations are his favorite, especially the one called Day and Night, where the negative space of white geese becomes black geese flying in the opposite direction. The white flock fly into a night sky, the black into day.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. —Wislawa Szymborska”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“We’ve all heard that the summit doesn’t matter but right now I think that might be something said to make us feel better about not getting there. It certainly doesn’t make me feel any better back in base camp while I pack my bags and wipe crumbs and old pieces of floss from the corners of my empty tent. The summit doesn’t matter. But then again, it kind of does. The summit matters because it’s the source of hope itself. It’s what brings us to the process to begin with. Only the view from the summit can illuminate its own insignificance.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“Just before midnight, Adrian and a talented young Ecuadorian climber named Esteban “Topo” Mena crawl from the tent. Topo climbed Everest without oxygen when he was only twenty-three but tonight he straps a regulator to his face and turns on a steady flow and his inhalations sound like Darth Vader. He’s here to support Adrian and me.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb. —Najwa Zebian”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“In Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari writes, “Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.” It’s a hopeful and powerful reprieve. Changing ourselves from the ground up by challenging and reimaging our core beliefs is the key to the cage.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“I’ve spent most of my life seeking an instant when my frenetic mind will calm and the thoughts will order themselves and all the discontent and discomfort will drain out like dirty bathwater. It’s common to misinterpret seismic shifts as singular moments that “changed everything.” But this is a disservice. What we’re describing is a tipping point preceded by a million moments of slow evolution, like dinosaurs sprouting feathers until they took flight and were offered a new perspective. But it’s a frustrating process and sometimes we get stuck. Just ask an ostrich. With repeated effort, we do wake up a little different every day until hindsight reveals that we are, in fact, flying. That’s the nature of mindfulness and therapy and processes like CBT—tiny deliberate moments that lead to encompassing change. Profundity isn’t flight but the evolution toward it. Waking up every day is profound. It’s seeing moments of magic when they’re offered and following them with abandon. I won’t instantaneously stop smoking and drinking and fucking my way through life. And somewhere deep down I know this. But the idea that I can change the stories that drive me is a flickering lightbulb in the basement of me.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within