Doing For Others Quotes (page 19)
What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What...
Cheryl Strayed
I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?
C. S. Lewis
If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom--there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am...
Anton Chekhov
If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it--pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. "Artistic" fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions--and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.
Julia Cameron
(While accepting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award) I've been thinking about why you have to get famous to get an award for helping other people...If your name is John Doe, and you work night and day doing things for your helpless neighbors, what you get for your effort is tired. So, Mr. and Mrs. Doe, and all of you who give of yourselves, to those who carry too big a burden to make it on their own, I want you to reach out and take your share of this...Because if I have earned it, so too...
Frank Sinatra
It's not the right word, Eva," he pressed on stubbornly, his lips at my ear. "That's why I haven't said it. It's not the right word for you and what I feel for you."Shut up. If you care about me at all, you'll just shut up and go away."I've been loved before--by Corinne, by other women...But what the hell do they know about me? What the hell are they in love with when they don't know how fucked up I am? If that's love, it's nothing compared to what I feel for you.
Sylvia Day
I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot...
Albert Camus
You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them
Gene Wolfe
...I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave abominably, and with such abominable results. They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Kurt Vonnegut